■n 



J 




■\.. 









tf:;;!n;!;' !■ ,ih,;;.;. ' 




m 

in:"!'';:.';', ,, ■ ' - 



'kA 






%. 



')• u: 



■•.;:;* 



',im^ 









iliiilii 



m^;:k.^.^^H.lil:Vr;^:':'-'^.:>!^'>u:^2: 



2L^m:- 




Book Jd.4-_ 



COPOUGHT DEPOSIT. 



Thomas De Quincey 
Opium-Eater — Reminiscences 



The World's Great Books 



Committee of Selection 
Thomas B. Reed William R. Harper 

Speaker of the Hou^e President of the 

of Representatives University of Chicago 



Edward Everett Hale Ainsworth R. SpofFord 

Author of The Man Of the Congressional 

Without a Country Library 

Rossiter Johnson 

Editor of Little Classics and Editor-in-Chief of this Series 



Aldine Edition 



Liter. 



ence 



Thon 



Aith 



^a:- 






n§o3ori4 




New York 



■tw^-^,.'m:h ^-mmm 



THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

Photogravure from a drawing made for this work, after a portrait 
sketched in chalk by James Archer. 



Confessions of an 
English Opium - Eaten 
Literary Reminiscences 

By 

Thomas De guincey 

With a Critical and Biographical Introduction 
by Ripley Hitchcock 

Illustrated 




New York 

D. Appleton and Company 

1899 



-\S^b V 



T^^ 



5 3.3- 



MA- 



Copyright, 1899, 
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 

rwo COPIES )7eC£IV&C». 




THOMAS DE QUINCEY 



IN point of time, Thomas De Quincey was a child of revolu- 
tion. He was born in 1785, at Greenhay, a suburb of Man- 
chester, then the home of his much travelled father, a well 
to do merchant. The dominant Zeitgeist of his formative 
years was revolt, accompanied by production, while at the end 
of our own century the time-spirit is essentially critical or 
expository. During his precocious childhood the influence of 
Goethe was mounting in Germany, and the ferment of the 
French Revolution was at work throughout the world. His 
youth and early manhood were contemporary with impulses 
like those which had to do with the Grecian War of Independ- 
ence, with the songs of Byron and of Keats, with the naturalistic 
movements in French and English letters and the romanticism 
of letters and art. At the close of our century the attitude of 
scientific scrutiny holds enthusiasm in leash. It is the fashion of 
the day to analyze great reputations with what we are pleased 
to term broad impartiality and to readjust rank, as the modern 
critics in the last twenty years have reclassified and renamed 
so many of the works in European picture galleries. New 
editions fail to reinvest the Byron of to-day with the glory of 
the century's earlier years, and Wordsworth, once the ark of 
the covenant, has, like Coleridge, been despoiled of much 
which it was once deemed sacrilege to touch. Whether we are 
pleased to call this iconoclasm, or " the new criticism," the tests 
brought by the time must be met, and we must look at 
De Quincey with the eyes of to-day, not with those of readers 
of the " London Magazine " in 1821. 

Thic spirit of inquiry has a virtue sometimes obscured by the 

iii 



iv THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

rashness of protagonists searching for crumbling idols in the 
Pantheon of letters. In spite of standards and canons, each 
generation, more or less consciously, modifies the judgments 
of its predecessor and, in general, ultimately reaches a mean 
between ultra conservatism and such sweeping condemnation 
of the past as American readers of periodicals have seen from 
Mr. Howells, and after him by a long interval, Mr. Clemens 
and Mr. Garland. In the case of De Quincey there have been 
peculiar obstacles to the attainment of a mean of popular com- 
prehension which should be just to the man and to his work. 
His lot was cast in a revolutionary period, and yet in many 
respects he was a conservative, and his purely literary affilia- 
tions were with the stately prose writers of the seventeenth 
century rather than the active unrest of the early nineteenth. 
Known to most readers as a dreamer, he was capable of the 
keenest analysis — witness his discussions of Shakspere and 
Goethe in the Encyclopedia Britannica. He has been held to 
be a rhetorician, a mere painter with words, and yet his analysis 
of Ricardo was gratefully acknowledged by so unrhetorical an 
economist as James Stuart Mill. Few writers, seemingly, 
have shown their personality more frankly in their work. Yet 
a reserve, of which Jean Paul and Sterne were ignorant, is felt 
by all who read between the lines, as it was felt by even his 
rare circle of friends at Grasmere and Edinburgh. This qual- 
ity of reticence in one who apparently exposed his inner 
thoughts has led to miscomprehensions second only in conse- 
quence to the persistent delusion as to the predominant influ- 
ence of opium upon De Quincey's contributions to Hterature. 
The late James T. Fields, a personal friend, as well as the 
publisher of De Quincey's collected works in America nearly 
fifty years ago, innocently encouraged this delusion in the 
lectures of his later years by constantly exhibiting a page of 
De Quincey's manuscript bearing the mark of his glass of 
laudanum. There was the drug, there was the manuscript. 
Post hoc, propter hoc. And so, for many reasons, there has 
grown up a popular inevitable association of De Quincey's rare 
and precious genius with the drug of the Orient, an association 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY V 

more widespread in his case than in that of Coleridge, and 
therefore to be more earnestly rebutted. There is the testi- 
mony of medical science that opium cannot communicate to 
the brain any power or faculty of which it is not already 
possessed, and there is the record of his infancy and youth, 
showing that his dream experiences did not begin with his 
use of opium. Dr. Eatwell's diagnosis indicates that by pal- 
liating De Quincey's gastrodynia and averting a tuberculous 
predisposition opium probably prolonged his life. 

If, then, we are to know the real De Quincey, we must follow 
him not only through his writings and those of his biographers, 
among whom Page is easily first, but we must also study the 
reactions of his individuality upon associates like Coleridge or 
Christopher North. The memoirs of Professor Wilson, pre- 
pared by his daughter, Mrs. Gordon, as well as the more famil- 
iar Noctes, is of intimate interest to students of De Quincey, 
even though in the latter we fail to accept the veritude of 
" The Opium-Eater's " monologues. In the " Confessions " 
presented complete in this volume there is so much of auto- 
biography that a recurrence to such facts is useful simply as 
they illustrate the predilections and shaping influences which 
determined the development and character of his art. The 
reader of his biography dwells, unconsciously, upon the early 
evidences of almost abnormal intellectual development and 
shrinking sensitiveness, upon the profound influence exerted 
by "the gentlest of sisters," Elizabeth, and by her death, when 
he was six, and upon the tenderness of his memory of his 
father, who died in 1792, when the son was only seven. The 
impressions of these early years, the apparent tuberculous taint 
revealed in his father and sisters, and his own gastrodynia, if we 
are to accept Dr. Eatwell's diagnosis, might have darkened all 
his literary expression but for the intensely vital humanity 
which was so large a part of his nature. This intense sympathy 
with his fellow-men makes itself felt even when we are wonder- 
ing at his early feats of scholastic prowess in the Bath school, 
his precocious mastery of dead languages, his study of Hebrew 
and theology with Lady Carbery, and his intimacy with the 



vi THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

Swedenborgian, John Clowes, during the unhappy life at the 
dull Manchester Grammar School, which he entered in 1801 
and left a fugitive. His constant desire to understand the 
feelings and motives of the rustics with whom he came into 
contact in the Welsh wanderings which followed his flight from 
school is no less characteristic than the intellectual hunger 
which found welcome food even then in an introduction to 
Richter and German literature. The bitterness of his subse- 
quent days of starvation in London was powerless over this 
love of mankind, and the pathetic tenderness of his attitude to- 
ward the lonely waif in Brunell's house, and toward the un- 
happy Ann touches us as nearly to-day as it touched the readers 
of 1812. Yet this is not a generation which weeps with Rich- 
ardson's sentimental heroines or one which shares the sorrows 
of Werther. 

If it were necessary here to follow De Quincey^s life with 
a minute scrutiny, something must be said of the growth of 
his attainments and his conversational powers, but " The Con- 
fessions " indicates the one and suggests the other. More 
essential to our purpose are his meeting with Coleridge in 1807 
and the intimacy with the " Lake School." Wordsworth he had 
worshipped from afar since reading "We are Seven*' in 1799, 
but in spite of the intellectual comprehension which Words- 
worth acknowledged, in the case of the appendix to the " Con- 
vention of Cintra," it was Coleridge who became his chosen 
friend. It is pleasanter to dwell upon his eager hero worship 
and his generous pecuniary aid than upon the indiscretion and 
dubious character of" certain of the reminiscences and com- 
ments which De Quincey contributed to " Tait's Magazine " 
from 1834 onward. For these Miss Mitford and many another 
literary or personal historian of the period has administered 
chastisement, and yet De Quincey's errors may fairly be 
ascribed to the suflFerings of many kinds which clouded that 
time. That the Grasmere associations exercised an interacting 
influence to some extent is no more doubtful than the occa- 
sional interaction of the painters associated with Fontaine- 
bleau, Rousseau, Diaz and Dupre. That there was no absolute 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY vil 

dependence, no self-surrender, is equally apparent. Both 
Coleridge and De Quincey were dreamers. Both were 
poets, although De Quincey is known to us as a writer 
of prose. The power to dream, which, as Coleridge said 
to Hazlitt, is essential to a class of poetry, was a power 
which De Quincey possessed without any adventitious aid. 
"How came you to dream more splendidly than others?" 
asks the imaginary reader of " Suspiria de Profundis," and 
De Quincey answers his own question, " Because (praemissis 
prsemittendis) I took excessive quantities of opium." It is an 
answer often misinterpreted, although, just before, he has 
spoken of his main purpose in writing the " Confessions " — 
"to display the faculty of dreaming itself." There are two 
sentences of De Quincey's own which should guide his read- 
ers : '* He whose talk is of oxen will probably dream of oxen," 
and again, " Habitually to dream magnificently a man must 
have a constitutional determination to reverie." Let the reader 
turn from the " Confessions " to the " Vision of Sudden Death," 
and again to " The Flight of a Tartar Tribe." 

There was no " talk of oxen " in those years at Grasmere, 
but rather the converse of high spirits, who " swept the harps 
of passion, of genial wit, or of the wrestling and gladiatorial 
reason." It was at Grasmere that he met Wilson, fervidus 
juventa, whose companionship on ambrosian nights and in 
long walks over the beautiful Westmoreland country cemented 
a lasting friendship. Southey, also, was of the company, but 
De Quincey's more intimate associations were with Wilson, 
and Charles Lloyd, Coleridge, and Wordsworth's children. 
These years, the sunniest of his life, years which brought him 
like-minded friends and a devoted wife, were unhappily over- 
shadowed toward 1818 by pecuniary losses, change, fruitless 
journalistic endeavours, and the nemesis of opium. But there 
was a solace in the affectionate welcome of the Lambs when 
De Quincey went to London in 1821. Through his gentle 
friend he entered a circle which numbered Hood, Talfourd, 
Cornwall and Hazlitt among its numbers, and it was to Elia 
again that he was indebted for an introduction to the editors 



Vlll THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

of the "London Magazine." It is desirable to trespass thus 
far upon the field of biography in order to suggest the char- 
acteristics, influences and equipment which preceded his actual 
entry into the world of letters. A tireless writer, he had 
seemed content to regard his writings as unfinished and 
unworthy of the light. A designer of vast intellectual enter- 
prises like his " De Emendatione," and his " Prolegomena of 
Political Economy," planned under Ricardo's influence, he 
faltered and finally laid them by. But in London he was 
impelled by the stimulus of active literary workers, of editors 
searching for apt material, and of presses asking to be fed. It 
was then that " The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater " 
passed from De Quincey's brain to paper. 

Of De Quincey's personality at this time. Hood, in his 
" Reminiscences," has left a charming sketch. " I have often 
found him at home," wrote Hood, then a sub-editor of the 
" London Magazine," doubtless on a quest for ' copy,' " I have 
often found him quite at home, in the midst of a German ocean 
of Literature in a storm — flooding all the floor, the table and 
the chairs — billows of books tossing, tumbling, surging, open 
— on such occasions I have willingly listened by the hour, 
whilst the Philosopher, standing, with his eyes fixed on one 
side of the room, seemed to be less speaking than reading 
from 'a handwriting on the wall.' Now and then he would 
diverge for a Scotch mile or two to the right or left, till I was 
tempted to inquire with Peregrine in * John Bull,' ' Do you 
never deviate?' — but he always came safely back to the point 
where he had left, not lost the scent, and thence hunted his 
topic to the end. But look! We are in the small hours, and 
a change comes o'er the spirit of that 'old familiar face.' A 
faint hectic tint leaves the cheek, the eyes are a degree dimmer, 
and each is surrounded by a growing shadow — signs of the 
waning influence of that Potent Drug whose stupendous Pleas- 
ures and enormous Pains have been so eloquently described 
by the English Opium-Eater." 

The actual writing of the " Confessions " at this time 
was due to one of the suggestions which the recording 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY IX 

angel may credit to the race of editors, however many 
sins of indifference or misjudgment must be debited against 
them. De Quincey, forced to turn from self-pleasing to 
the practical side of literature, had contemplated a begin- 
ning with translations from the German literature wherein 
he had steeped himself. But the circle which he had 
entere'd had heard him describe his initiation into the use of 
opium in 1804, and the splendid dreams and gloomy phantasma 
which had accompanied use, abandonment, and relapse. It 
was suggested, therefore, that his own experiences should be 
the subject of his first contributions to the magazine. At this 
time De Quincey, after a brief residence in Soho, had removed 
to Covent Garden. It was there that he wrote "The Con- 
fessions," " in a little room at the back of what later became 
Mr. H. G. Bohn's premises. No. 4 York street, Covent Garden, 
where Mr. De Quincey resided in comparative seclusion for 
several years." In a curious comparison of the effects of opium 
upon Coleridge and himself, De Quincey has said: "There 
was one point in which my case differed from that of Mr. Coler- 
idge. It was this — that at times, when I had slept at more 
regular hours for several nights consecutively, and had armed 
myself by a sudden increase of the opium for a few days run- 
ning, I recovered at times a remarkable glow of jovial spirits. 
It was in some such artificial respites, from my usual state of 
distress, and purchased at a heavy price of subsequent suffer- 
ing, that I wrote the greater part of the " Opium Confessions," 
in the autumn of 1821." But the print of the glass of laudanum 
negus on the manuscript must not hide from the reader the 
words beneath: "He whose talk is of oxen will probably 
dream of oxen." It is not the opium, but De Quincey who i^ 
to be reckoned with above all else. 

The profound impression caused by the publication of the 
" Confessions " is reflected in letters from literary authorities of 
the time, and in a multitude of printed analyses, eulogies and 
inquiries. Our own " North American Review" expressed a 
general feeling when it printed a doubt whether "what is 
sometimes stated as narrative, is not really meant for brilliant 



X THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

fiction, or at least for ' fiction founded on fact.' " The demand 
for the numbers of the magazine containing the " Confessions " 
led to a reprint in 1822 and a second edition in 1823, with an 
appendix showing the reduction in the amounts of opium taken 
day by day. But for some time De Quincey was unwilling to 
yield to the pressure for a continuation of the " Confessions." 
Through his friendship with Charles Knight he was led to 
contribute some translations from the German to the " Quar- 
terly Magazine," and a little later in this time of exile from his 
Westmoreland cottage and his family he contributed to "Black- 
wood's " series on the " German Prose Writers " and sev- 
eral of his best essays, among them " Murder considered as 
one of the Fine Arts," his tour de force in irony. This connec- 
tion with Edinburgh led to a visit in 1828 which resulted prac- 
tically in a transfer of his literary interests to that city where his 
only novel, " Klosterheim," was published, where he was joined 
by his family and where Mrs. De Quincey died in 1837. It was 
within a few miles of Edinburgh at Mavis Bush, a cottage near 
Lasswade, that he made his home for nearly all the remainder 
of his life from 1840 until that December morning in 1859 
when, with a call to the beloved sister lost in childhood, he fell 
asleep free at last from pain. 

If we are to judge a man by his companions, the few names 
which have been cited as of De Quincey's company would tell 
a sufficient story. If we are to take the boy as father of the 
man, then the precocious intellectual avidity of De Quincey, 
his extraordinary attainments, his symphonic use of language, 
and the subtlety of his literary and philosophic appreciation 
serve to guide the student of De Quincey's life. That this life 
brought to him more of sorrow than of happiness need not be 
insisted upon. From his earliest childhood, death was near 
him, and he escaped its menace only to see the blow fall upon 
those whom he would have shielded in his arms. Absolutely 
unworldly, so unversed in the common usages of practical life 
that a draft or cheque was a source of mystification and 
even his vast accumulations of papers were sometimes for- 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY xi 

gotten, he found himself constrained after thirty, to face the 
necessity for winning bread with his pen. Of his physical 
sufferings from illness in youth, from actual starvation in his 
youthful vagabondage, and of the black horrors which 
enshrouded him when opium demanded its penalty, he has 
told us with the singular intellectual detachment, intentness 
of self scrutiny and the splendour of rhetoric exhibited in the 
" Confessions " and the " Suspiria." As to the power of the 
drug, De Quincey himself in 1855 recorded four relapses, one 
in 181 3-1 6 before his marriage, another in 181 7- 18, a third 
in London in 1824-25, and a fourth between 1841 and 1844. 
That the stress of these varied assaults had their effect in time 
may be admitted as we note a certain unreliability and 
acerbity in portions of De Quincey's later writings, but the 
admission means the same discrimination and reserve regard- 
ing the acceptance of the complete body of De Quincey'*- 
works which are applied, in the process of survival and selec- 
tion, to the literary remains of the masters. When we make 
this application to De Quincey we may confess at once that 
his purely analytical and expository discussions have shown 
far less vitality than his autobiographic and imaginative writ- 
ings. It is true that the romance " Klosterheim " is seldom 
read, but the general distinction holds. The " Templar's Dia- 
logues on Political Economy," remarkable though they are, 
in themselves, and as illustrations of De Quincey's power of 
close concentrated thinking and clear analysis, are doubtless 
unfamiliar even to the majority of the class known as cultured 
readers. It would be easy to multiply the titles of essays in De 
Quincey's works which are among the literary bequests 
respected but not read. We may and do count this unfortunate, 
but it becomes of the greater interest to consider some of the 
reasons for the persistent vitality of works like "The 
Confessions." 

The causes of this indubitable survival are not disclosed in 
the obvious fascination of a strange theme and a stranger 
apparent frankness in self revelation. The charm of style is 
apparent. A seventeenth century writer, William Drummond, 



xii THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

of Hawthornden, now lost to the view of all save students, has 
incited Mr. Edmund Gosse to a very interesting comparison 
with De Quincey as regards " delicate fullness and harmony, 
and deliberate and studied mellifluousness." That De Quincey, 
this representative of the second generation of romanticism 
was " sometimes noisy and flatulent, sometimes trivial, and 
sometimes unpardonably discussive " are strictures which Mr. 
Gosse is justified in rnaking, when we take into account the 
entire range of De Quincey's work, but these divagations, as 
the critic hastens to point out, fail to dim the mental alertness, 
^melody of style, humour and good sense and "the passionate 
i loyalty to letters " of De Quincey at his best. It is an 
/ evident comment that De Quincey was a master of impas- 
/ sioned prose, a discoverer, almost, of a new land midway 
Y^^)etween prose and lofty verse. Again his expression 
.^came simple, almost idiomatic. Yet, although the theme 
^^nvites definitions and development, it may be postulated 
bluntly that the generations follow their own gods, and the style 
of Stevenson is not the style of Addison. The stately phrasing 
of Milton's time appealed intimately to De Quincey, and yet 
in an age like ours, so far removed from Milton in point of liter- 
ary expression, De Quincey retains his charm. To every new 
reader of " The Confessions," there comes the uplifting con- 
sciousness of the impulse .due to great and imaginative power. 
Together with this and impinging more nearly upon the actual 
orbit of our times there is the consciousness of the man, of 
the writer's humanity and his lively and sympathetic interest in 
his kind. In De Quincey's notes on the " Constituents of Hap- 
piness," drafted at Everton in 1805, we find the first to be " A 
capacity of thinking — i. e., of abstraction and reverie," and 
the second, " The cultivation of an interest in all that concerns 
human life and human nature." This interest lives through- 
out " The Confessions." " Plain human nature in its humblest 
and most homely apparel was enough for me," he writes, refer- 
ring to the lonely child in Brunell's house, and the key-note 
struck then is sounded again and again from the friendly com- 
munication with the poor in the markets on Saturday night to 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY Xlll 

the fraternizing with gipsies on Glasgow Green, and the indul- 
gence to beggars at Lasswade, of which his daughter tells us. 
This was not mere curious observation. De Quincey's sym- 
pathetic interest in humanity has been felt and answered by 
his readers, and therein lies a strong claim upon posterity. 

Another reason less strenuous, but enduring, lies in the rare 
quality of his subtle humour, a humour as quaint and unexpected 
as that of Lamb though so different in kind and expression 
that comparison would be profitless. " Essentially and always 
a humorist," was the definition of one critic entitled to respect, 
" a humorist of a very rare and delicate order, but one whose 
very delicacy is mistaken by hard minds for feebleness." It 
is here, as Page has well said, that De Quincey parts com- 
pany alike from Coleridge and from Wordsworth. The one 
aspired to build a complete metaphysical system, the other 
gathered a wealth of " meditative impression " from nature, and 
humour in either would have been inconsistent. In Wilson, 
humorist and humanist, De Quincey had a constant and com- 
prehending friend and their accord illustrates certain per- 
sistent traits in De Quincey's character. ''Humour," to quote 
Page again, "in combination with but such modes of intel- 
lectual sympathy as are signified by the names of Wordsworth 
and Ricardo, is one of the most remarkable phenomena on 
record. But we find it in De Quincey. * * * jf this ever- 
present and kindly humour — this keen sense of the ludicrous 
and the salient disparities of life — saved him from pedantry, 
it did so only by making absolutely necessary for him a recur- 
rent contact with real life itself." 

Although De Quincey, as he tells us, "well knew that his 
proper vocation was the exercise of the analytic understand- 
ing, he spent perhaps the greater part of his time in the exer- 
cise of the imagination, taking profound delight in the sublime 
and more passionate poets, in the grand lamentations of * Sam- 
son Agonistes,' or the great harmonies of the Satanic Speeches 
in ' Paradise Regained.' " It would be idle to attempt a parallel 
between the imagination of De Quincey and that of Poe, or 
Byron. The splendid conceptions and gorgeous colouring of 



XIV THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

De Quincey^s dreams, mysterious, yet vivid as actuality, main- 
tain and will preserve their power in the " Confessions," and 
the " Suspiria." The murderer still stalks at night upon the 
heath, the Malay lingers a haunting, fearsome figure, and above 
the earth, vast processions cross the heavens, and there are the 
symphonies of celestial orchestras and visions of radiant cities 
not built with hands. 

It is natural that the fervour of De Quincey's rhetoric should 
have enlisted the sympathy of the romantic writers of France, 
but the unlikeness of the racial point of view could point many 
a curious moral. The author of Fleurs du Mai translated " The 
Confessions " into French, as he did the tales of Poe, and in 
spite of the obvious lack of affinity Baudelaire's success was 
complete, as compared with a singular and little known 
effort by De Musset, to which I have been introduced by 
Mr. Walter Littlefield. Up to the meeting with Ann, 
De Musset's course was comparatively smooth, but that 
pathetic and innocent relationship was incomprehensible. 
One can almost see him frowning, hesitating, and finally 
abandoning his original to substitute a liaison, a titled 
interloper, a duel, and a triumphant hero. There are few 
more remarkable contributions than this to the chapter of 
differences between Anglo-Saxon and Gallic temperamental 
tendencies. Very recently Arvede Barine, in his Nevroses, 
published in Paris, has grouped De Quincey, Hoffmann, Poe 
and De Norval, as illustrations of the baleful effects of opium, 
wine, alcohol and la folie. Such easy generalizations have 
been common since the publication of Nordau's " Degenera- 
tion," but the weak point is the impossibility of a complete 
demonstration. De Quincey with a different physical consti- 
tution, might have been De Quincey with a different mind. 
Without opium his life might have been cut short. A wholly 
normal life might have left a greater literary monument, and 
his influence upon letters might have had a weightiness which 
we must confess it lacks, but these are only curious specula- 
tions. M. Barine is fascinated by the mere pathology of 
genius. " The majority of English critics," to quote Barine's 




:OUS AND UNIQUE MANUSCRIPT AND 
BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS. 



A series of fac-similes, showing the development of manuscript and 
book illustrating during four thousand years. 




ST. JOHN ON THE ISLAND OF PATMOS, 
Illuminated miniature from a manuscript of the fifteenth century. 



ab:- 



Tto^'s 



a r -A 



. THOMAS DE QUINCEY XV 

sweeping assertion, " have refused to attach any importance 
to De Quincey's work, in spite of his championship of the 
Lake School, in spite of all that he did to initiate England into 
German thought, and these critics are right." Perhaps this 
quotation is enough to show the poverty of the French writer's 
method. His summary is equally misleading, '' Some jewels 
of great price among the dust and bones of a tomb, this is 
what De Quincey has left us, this is the work of opium." Now 
the weakness of M. Barine, and writers of his class, is that 
the dust and bones are more significant in their eyes than the 
jewels. Doubtless it is to be regretted that De Quincey left 
no lasting impress as philosopher or economist, or even as 
critic, but when all is said, and all eliminations are made, 
De Quincey remains one of the few whose purely literary 
achievement abides with us and retains its charm. 

In the qualities which I have emphasized, primarily in 
imagination and noble eloquence, sympathy with humanity, 
humour, and indefinable personal charm, the "Confessions" 
and the '' Suspiria " in themselves offer us sufficient reasons for 
the stability of De Quincey's place in the history of English 
letters. It is pleasant to recall the early appreciation of this 
place bestowed in America. The recognition given so gen- 
erously by the " North American Review •' on the first publi- 
cation of "The Confessions," was followed by many similar 
comments and analyses in the same periodical. Hawthorne, 
to whom the subtle fancy of De Quincey appealed with pecu- 
liar closeness, is described in one of his daughter's letters as 
reading De Quincey at Lenox, in the " long beautiful even- 
ings in 1 85 1," and letters from Miss De Quincey in Julian 
Hawthorne's biography of his father suggest the cordiality of 
the appreciation on the other side. Mr. Jacox describes a 
walk with De Quincey in Edinburgh when he stopped to buy 
a copy of " Mosses from an old Manse," and this led De Quin- 
cey " to talk of Hawthorne's genius and to mention a recent 
visit of Emerson's — to neither of whom could he accord quite 
the degree of admiration claimed for them by the more thor- 
ough going of their respective admirers," although later, De 



xvi THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

Quincey read " The Scarlet Letter " " with a great access of 
admiration/ In 1854 we find Hawthorne making the two 
sweeping assertions : " In fact no EngHshman cares a pin for 
De Quincey. We are ten times as good readers and critics as 
they." This was in a letter to Mr. James T. Fields, who had 
visited De Quincey in 1852, and, despite the non-existence of 
international copyright, had left behind him a cheque, a share 
in the profits of the American edition. It was due to the 
strong appreciation of Mr. Fields and Mr. Ticknor as well that 
America produced the first complete edition of De Quincey's 
works, published in twenty-two volumes, 1851-54. The appear- 
ance of the present edition of " The Confessions " continues 
this record of American appreciation of De Quincey's fine and 

fragrant genius. 

Ripley Hitchcock. 



THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE 



1HERE present you, courteous reader, with the record of a 
remarkable period of my life ; according to my application 
of it, I trust that it will prove, not merely an interesting 
record, but, in a considerable degree, useful and instructive. 
In that hope it is that I have drawn it up ; and that must be my 
apology for breaking through that delicate and honourable 
reserve, which, for the most part, restrains us from the public 
exposure of our own errors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed, 
is more revolting to English feelings, than the spectacle of 
a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers, or 
scars, and tearing away that " decent drapery " which time, 
or indulgence to human frailty, may have drawn over them; 
accordingly, the greater part of our confessions (that is, spon- 
taneous and extra-judicial confessions) proceed from demi- 
reps, adventurers, or swindlers; and for any such acts of 
gratuitous self-humiliation from those who can be supposed 
in sympathy with the decent and self-respecting part of 
society, we must look to French literature, or to that part of 
the German which is tainted with the spurious and defective 
sensibility of the French. All this I feel so forcibly, and so 
nervously am I alive to reproach of this tendency, that I have 
for many months hesitated about the propriety of allowing 
this, or any part of my narrative, to come before the public 
eye, until after my death (when, for many reasons, the whole 
will be published); and it is not without an anxious review of 
the reasons for and against this step, that I have, at last, 
concluded on taking it. 

Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public 
notice: they court privacy and soHtude; and, even in the 
choice of a grave, will sometimes sequester themselves from 
the general population of the church-yard, as if declining to 
claim fellowship with the great family of man, and wishing 
(in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth) 

xvii 



XVlll THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE 

" Humbly to express 
A penitential loneliness." 

It is well, upon the whole, and for the interest of us all, that 
it should be so; nor would I willingly, in my own person, 
manifest a disregard of such salutary feelings; nor in act or 
word do anything to weaken them. But, on the one hand, 
as my self-accusation does not amount to a confession of 
guilt, so, on the other, it is possible that, if it did, the benefit 
resulting to others, from the record of an experience pur- 
chased at so heavy a price, might compensate, by a vast over- 
balance, for any violence done to the feelings I have noticed, 
and justify a breach of the general rule. Infirmity and misery 
do not, of necessity, imply guilt. Tliey approach, or recede 
from, the shades of that dark alliance, in proportion to the 
probable motives and prospects of the ofifender, and the pallia- 
tions, known or secret, of the ofifence; in proportion as the 
temptations to it were potent from the first, and the resistance 
to it, in act or in effort, was earnest to the last. For my own 
part, without breach of truth or modesty, I may afhrm, that 
my life has been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher: from 
my birth I was made an intellectual creature; and intellectual 
in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, 
even from my school-boy days. If opium-eating be a sensual 
pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged 
in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man, it is no 
less true, that I have struggled against this fascinating enthrall- 
ment with a religious zeal, and have at length accomplished 
what I never yet heard attributed to any other man — ■■ have 
untwisted, almost to its final Hnks, the accursed chain which 
fettered me. Such a self-conquest may reasonably be set off 
in counterbalance to any kind or degree of self-indulgence. 
Not to insist that, in my case, the self-conquest was unques- 
tionable, the self-indulgence open to doubts of casuistry, 
according as that name shall be extended to acts aiming at 
the bare relief of pain, or shall be restricted to such as aim 
at the excitement of positive pleasure. 

Guilt, therefore, I do not acknowledge; and, if I did, it is 
possible that I might still resolve on the present act of con- 
fession, in consideration of the service which I may thereby 
render to the whole class of opium-eaters. But who are they? 
Reader, I am sorry to say, a very numerous class indeed. Of 
this I became convinced, some years ago, by computing, at 
that time, the number of those in one small class of English 



THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE xix 

society (the class of men distinguished for talent, or of emi- 
nent station) who were known to me, directly or indirectly, 
as opium-eaters ; such, for instance, as the eloquent and benev- 
olent ;' the late Dean of ;' Lord ;' Mr. , 

the philosopher;* a late under-secretary of state ** (who 
described to me the sensation which first drove him to the 

use of opium, in the very same words as the Dean of , 

namely, ** that he felt as though rats were gnawing and abrad- 
ing the coats of his stomach "); Mr. ;" and many others, 

hardly less known, whom it would be tedious to mention. 
Now, if one class, comparatively so limited, could furnish so 
many scores of cases (and that within the knowledge of one 
single inquirer), it was a natural inference, that the entire 
population of England would furnish a proportionable num- 
ber. The soundness of this inference, however, I doubted, 
until some facts became known to me, which satisfied me that 
it was not incorrect. I will mention two: Three respect- 
able London druggists, in widely remote quarters of London, 
from whom I happened lately to be purchasing small quanti- 
ties of opium, assured me that the number of amateur opium- 
eaters (as I may term them) was, at this time, immense; and 
that the difficulty of distinguishing these persons, to whom 
habit had rendered opium necessary, from such as were pur- 
chasing it with a view to suicide, occasioned them daily trouble 
and disputes. This evidence respected London only. But, 
(which will possibly surprise the reader more), some years 
ago, on passing through Manchester, I was informed by 
several cotton manufacturers that their work-people were 
rapidly getting into the practice of opium-eating; so much 
so, that on a Saturday afternoon the counters of the druggists 
were strewed with pills of one, two, or three grains, in prepara- 
tion for the known demand of the evening. The immediate 
occasion of this practice was the lowness of wages, which, at 
that time, would not allow them to indulge in ale or spirits; 
and, wages rising, it may be thought that this practice would 
cease: but, as I do not readily believe that any man, having 
once tasted the divine luxuries of opium, will afterwards 
descend to the gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol, I 
take it for granted 

" That those eat now who never ate before; 
And those who always ate now eat the more." 

Indeed, the fascinating powers of opium are admitted, even 
by medical writers who are its greatest enemies: thus, for 



XX THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE 

instance, Awsiter, apothecary to Greenwich Hospital, in his 
" Essay on the Effects of Opium " (pubHshed in the year 
1763), when attempting to explain why Mead had not been 
sufficiently explicit on the properties, counter-agents, etc., of 
this drug, expresses himself in the following mysterious terms 
(^ovovrra ou^^erocui): "Perhaps he thought the subject of too 
delicate a nature to be made common; and as many people 
might then indiscriminately use it, it would take from that 
necessary fear and caution, which should prevent their experi- 
encing the extensive power of this drug; for there are many 
properties in it, if universally known, that would habituate the 
use, and make it more in request with us than the Turks them- 
selves; the result of which knowledge," he adds, "must prove 
a general misfortune." In the necessity of this conclusion 
I do not altogether concur; but upon that point I shall have 
occasion to speak at the close of my Confessions, where I 
shall present the reader with the moral of my narrative. 

Notes 

* William Wilberforce. 

' Isaac Milner. He was nominally known to the public as Dean of 
Carlisle, being colloquially always called Dean Milner; but virtually he 
was best known in his own circle as the head of Queen's College, 
Cambridge, where he usually resided. In common with his brother, 
Joseph of Hull, he was substantially a Wesleyan Methodist; and in 
that character, as regarded principles and the general direction of his 
sympathies, he pursued his deceased brother's " History of the Chris- 
tian Church " down to the era of Luther. In these days, he would 
perhaps not be styled a Methodist, but simply a Low-Churchman. 
By whatever title described, it is meantime remarkable that a man 
confessedly so conscientious as Dean Milner could have reconciled 
to his moral views the holding of church preferment so important as 
this deanery in combination with the headship of an important college. 
One or other must have been consciously neglected. Such a record, 
meantime, powerfully illustrates the advances made by the Church 
during the last generation in practical homage to self-denying religious 
scruples. A very lax man would not in these days allow himself to 
do that which thirty years ago a severe Church-Methodist (regarded 
by many even as a fanatic) persisted in doing without feeling himself 
called on for apology. If I have not misapprehended its tenor, this 
case serves most vividly to illustrate the higher standard of moral 
responsibility which prevails in this current generation. We do injus- 
tice daily to our own age; which, by many a sign, palpable and secret, 
I feel to be more emphatically, than any since the period of Queen 
Elizabeth and Charles I, an intellectual, a moving, and a self-con- 
flicting age: and inevitably, where the intellect has been preternaturally 
awakened, the moral sensilDility must soon be commensurately stirred. 
The very distinctions, psychologic or metaphysical, by which, as its 
hinges and articulations, our modern thinking moves, proclaim the 
subtler character of the questions which now occupy our thoughts. 



THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE xxi 

Not as pedantic only, but as suspiciously unintelligible, such distinc- 
tions would, one hundred and thirty years ago, have been viewed as 
indictable; and perhaps (in company with Mandevill'e's " Political 
Economy ")' would have been seriously presented as a nuisance to the 
Middlesex Quarter-Sessions. Recurring, however, to Dean Milner, 
and the recollections of his distinguished talents amongst the contem- 
porary circles of the first generation in this nineteenth century, I wish 
to mention that these talents are most feebly measured by any of his 
occasional writings, all drawn from him apparently by mere pressure 
of casual convenience. In conversation it was that he asserted ade- 
quately his preeminent place. Wordsworth, who met him often at 
the late Lord Lonsdale's table, spoke of him uniformly as the chief 
potentate colloquially of his own generation, and as the man beyond 
all others (Burke being departed) who did not live upon his recollec- 
tions, but met the demands of every question that engaged his sym- 
pathy by spontaneous and elastic movements of novel and original 
thought. As an opium-eater. Dean Milner was understood to be a 
strenuous wrestler with the physical necessity that coerced him into 
this habit. From several quarters I have heard that his daily ration 
was 34 grains (or about 850 drops of laudanum), divided into four 
portions, and administered to him at regular intervals of six hours 
by a confidential valet. 

' The first Lord Erskine. 

* Who is Mr. Dash, the philosopher? Really, I have forgotten. Not 
through any fault of my own, but on the motion of some absurd 
coward having a voice potential at the press, all the names were 
struck out behind my back in the first edition of the book, thirty-five 
years ago. I was not consulted; and did not discover the absurd 
blanks until months afterwards, when I was taunted with them very 
reasonably by a caustic reviewer. Nothing could have a more ludi- 
crous effect than this appeal to shadows — to my Lord Dash, to Dean 
Dash, and to Mr. Secretary Dash. Very naturally it thus happened 
to Mr. Philosopher Dash that his burning light, alas! was extinguished 
irrecoverably in the general melee. Meantime, there was no excuse 
whatever for this absurd interference such as might have been alleged 
in any personality capable of causing pain to any one person con- 
cerned. All the cases, except, perhaps, that of Wilberforce (about 
which I have at this moment some slight lingering doubts), were 
matters of notoriety to large circles of friends. It is due to Mr. John 
Taylor, the accornplished publisher of the work, that I should acquit 
him of any share in this absurdity. — 1821. 

^ Mr. Addington, brother of Lord Sidmouth. 

" Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 



CONTENTS 

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 



rAGB 

I 



I, Preliminary Confessions 

II. The Pleasures of Opium 34 

III. The Pains of Opium ^ 

Appendix 

SUSPIRIA DE PrOFUNDIS 

I. Introductory ^i 

II. The Affliction of Childhood 99 

III. The Palimpsest . ' ^^i 

IV. Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow H9 

V. The Apparition of the Brocken 1 5^ 

VI. Savannah-la-mar ^^^ 



VII. Vision of Life 



164 



THE English Mail-Coach 

I. The Glory of Motion ^^7 

II. The Vision of Sudden Death 212 

III. Dream Fugue • • • -^28 

Literary Reminiscences 

Charles Lamb ^39 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 291 

WiUiam Wordsworth 3" 5 

Society of the Lakes 44^ 

xxiii 



F 



-:, FAMOUS AND UNIQUE MANUSCRIPT AND 
^^^^^-^ — BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS. 

A series of fac-similes, showing the development of manuscript and 
^^,r,^r;\^. book illustrating during four thousand years. 



.FACSIMILE OF FIFTEENTH-CENTURY WOOD 

engraving' IN THE BIBLIA PAUPERUM 

^^~^ ■ "^^ - . ■; ._. ^ __ ,..^.'^.:,i ' ;' 

Representing David vanquishing Goliath, and Christ heifeg cripi3les. 



■I 







^^cpij 



litmttiitio.. .. . 



awA T^i^oauviAM aupiMu qma auoMA-i 

.aV10ITA^T8U ■ '^ ooa 



W:^^A^^\5K!\ kVmV^ 'AWT Vi\ ^YiV^kSl^VV^ 






f^^weofte^y- 1) HPttiof6ei\)VTio* 




V^jS^v9 0.m{^m(i^-hm\Jk(hiuaopitt 



CONFESSIONS 



OF AN 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 



PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 

THESE preliminary confessions, or introductory narrative 
of the youthful adventures which laid the foundation of 
the writer's habit of opium-eating in after life, it has 
been judged proper to premise, for three several reasons: 

1. As forestalHng that question, and giving it a satisfac- 
tory answer, which else would painfully obtrude itself in the 
course of the Opium Confessions — ** How came any reason- 
able being to subject himself to such a yoke of misery, volun- 
tarily to incur a captivity so servile, and knowingly to fetter 
himself with such a seven-fold chain? — " a question which, 
if not somewhere plausibly resolved, could hardly fail, by 
the indignation which it would be apt to raise as against an 
act of wanton folly, to interfere with that degree of sympathy 
which is necessary in any case to an author's purposes. 

2. As furnishing a key to some parts of that tremendous 
scenery which afterwards peopled the dreams of the opium- 
eater. 

3. As creating some previous interest of a personal sort 
in the confessing subject, apart from the matter of the con- 
fessions, which cannot fail to render the confessions them- 
selves more interesting. If a man " whose talk is of oxen " 
should become an opium-eater, the probability is, that (if he 
is not too dull to dream at all) he will dream about oxen: 
whereas, in the case before him, the reader will find that the 

I 



2 DE QUINCEY 

Opium-eater boasteth himself to be a philosopher; and accord- 
ingly, that the phantasmagoria of his dreams (waking or 
sleeping, day dreams or night dreams) is suitable to one who, 
in that character, 

" Humani nihil a se alienum putat." 

For amongst the conditions which he deems indispensable 
to the sustaining of any claim to the title of philosopher, is 
not merely the possession of a superb intellect in its analytic 
functions (in which part of the pretension, however, England 
can for some generations show but few claimants; at least, 
he is not aware of any known candidate for this honor who 
can be styled emphatically a subtle thinker, with the exception 
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and, in a narrower department 
of thought with the recent illustrious exception ^ of David 
Ricardo), — but also on such a constitution of the moral 
faculties as shall give him an inner eye and power of intuition 
for the vision and mysteries of human nature: that constitu- 
tion of faculties, in short, which (amongst all the generations 
of men that from the beginning of time have deployed into 
life, as it were, upon this planet) our English poets have pos- 
sessed in the highest degree — and Scottish professors in the 
lowest. 

I have often been asked how I first came to be a reg-ular 
opium-eater; and have suffered, very unjustly, in the opinion 
of my acquaintance, from being reputed to have brought upon 
myself all the sufferings which I shall have to record, by a 
long course of indulgence in this practice, purely for the sake 
of creating an artificial state of pleasurable excitement. This, 
however, is a misrepresentation of my case. True it is, that 
for nearly ten years I did occasionally take opium, for the 
sake of the exquisite pleasure it gave me; but, so long as T 
took it with this view, I was effectually protected from all 
material bad consequences, by the necessity of interposing 
long intervals between the several acts of indulgence, in order 
to renew the pleasurable sensations. It was not for the pur- 
pose of creating pleasure, but of mitigating pain in the severest 
degree, that I first began to use opium as an article of daily 
diet. In the twenty-eighth year of my age, a most painful 
affection of the stomach, which I had first experienced about 
ten years before, attacked me in great strength. This affec- 
tion had originally been caused by the extremities of hunger, 
suffered in my boyish days. During the season of hope and 
redundant happiness which succeeded (that is, from eighteen 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 3 

to twenty-four) it had slumbered : for the three following years 
it had revived at intervals; and now, under unfavorable cir- 
cumstances, from depression of spirits, it attacked me with 
violence that yielded to no remedies but opium. As the 
youthful sufferings which first produced this derangement of 
the stomach were interesting in themselves and in the cir- 
cumstances that attended them, I shall here briefly retrace 
them. 

My father died when I was about seven years old, and left 
me to the care of four guardians. I was sent to various 
schools, great and small; and was very early distinguished for 
my classical attainments, especially for my knowledge of 
Greek. At thirteen I wrote Greek with ease; and at fifteen 
my command of that language was so great, that I not only 
composed Greek verses in lyric metres, but would converse 
in Greek fluently, and without embarrassment — an accom- 
plishment which I have not since met with in any scholar of 
my times, and which, in my case, was owing to the practice 
of daily reading off the newspapers into the best Greek I 
could furnish extempore; for the necessity of ransacking my 
memory and invention for all sorts and combinations of peri- 
phrastic expressions, as equivalents for modern ideas, images, 
relations of things, etc., gave me a compass of diction which 
would never have been called out by a dull translation of 
moral essays, etc. " That boy," said one of my masters, point- 
mg the attention of a stranger to me, '' that boy could 
harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address 
an English one." He who honored me with this eulogy was 
a scholar, "and a ripe and good one," and, of all my tutors, 
was the only one whom I loved or reverenced. Unfortu- 
nately for me (and, as I afterwards learned, to this worthy 
man's great indignation), I was transferred to the care, first 
of a blockhead, who was in a perpetual panic lest I should 
expose his ignorance; and, finally, to that of a. respectable 
scholar, at the head of a great school on an ancient founda- 
tion. This man had been appointed to his situation by 

College, Oxford; and was a sound, well-built scholar, but 
(like most men whom I have known from that college) coarse, 
clumsy, and inelegant. A miserable contrast he presented, 
m my eyes, to the Etonian brilliancy of my favorite master; 
and, besides, he could not disguise from my hourly notice 
the poverty and meagreness of his understanding. It is a 
bad thing for a boy to be, and know himself, far beyond his 
tutors, whether in knowledge or in power of mind. This was 



4 DE QUINCEY 

the case, so far as regarded knowledge at least, not with 
myself only; for the two boys who jointly with myself com- 
posed the first form were better Grecians than the head- 
master, though not more elegant scholars, nor at all more 
accustomed to sacrifice to the graces. When I first entered, 
I remember that we read Sophocles; and it was a constant 
matter of triumph to us, the learned triumvirate of the first 
form, to see our " Archididascalus " (as he loved to be called) 
conning our lesson before we went up, and laying a regular 
train, with lexicon and grammar, for blowing up and blasting 
(as it were) any difficulties he found in the choruses; whilst 
we never condescended to open our books, until the moment 
of going up, and were generally employed in writing epigrams 
upon his wig, or some such important matter. My two class- 
fellows were poor, and dependent, for their future prospects 
at the university, on the recommendation of the head-master; 
but I, who had a small patrimonial property, the income of 
which was sufficient to support me at college, wished to be 
sent thither immediately. I made earnest representations on 
the subject to my guardians, but all to no purpose. One, who 
was more reasonable, and had more knowledge of the world 
than the rest, lived at a distance; two of the other three 
resigned all their authority into the hands of the fourth; and 
this fourth, with whom I had to negotiate, was a worthy man, 
in his way, but haughty, obstinate, and intolerant of all oppo- 
sition to his will. After a certain number of letters and per- 
sonal interviews, I found that I had nothing to hope for, not 
even a compromise of the matter, from my guardian : uncondi- 
tional submission was what he demanded; and I prepared 
myself, therefore, for other measures. Summer was now 
coming on with hasty steps, and my seventeenth birth-day 
was fast approaching; after which day I had sworn within 
myself that I would no longer be numbered amongst school- 
boys. Money being what I chiefly wanted, I wrote to a 
woman of high rank, who, though young herself, had known 
me from a child, and had latterly treated me with great dis- 
tinction, requesting that she would " lend " me five guineas. 
For upwards of a week no answer came, and I was beginning 
to despond, when, at length, a servant put into my hands a 
double letter, with a coronet on the seal. The letter was kind 
and obliging, the fair writer was on the sea-coast, and in that 
way the delay had arisen; she enclosed double of what I had 
asked, and good-naturedly hinted, that if I should never repay 
her, it would not absolutely ruin her. Now, then, I was 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 5 

prepared for my scheme: ten guineas, added to about two 
that I had remaining from my pocket money, seemed to me 
sufficient for an indefinite length of time; and at that happy 
age, if no definite boundary can be assigned to one's power, 
the spirit of hope and pleasure makes it virtually infinite. 

It is a just remark of Dr. Johnson's (and, what cannot often 
be said of his remarks, it is a very feeling one) that we never 
do anything consciously for the last time (of things, that is, 
which we have long been in the habit of doing), without 
sadness of heart. This truth I felt deeply when I came to 

leave , a place which I did not love, and where I had not 

been happy. On the evening before I left forever, I 

grieved when the ancient and lofty school-room resounded 
with the evening service, performed for the last time in my 
hearing; and at night, when the muster-roll of names was 
called over, and mine (as usual) was called first, I stepped 
forward, and passing the head-master, who was standing by, 
I bowed to him, and looking earnestly in his face, thinking to 
myself, '' He is old and infirm, and in this world I shall not 
see him again." I was right; I never did see him again, nor 
never shall. He looked at me complacently, smiled good- 
naturedly, returned my salutation (or rather my valediction), 
and we parted (though he knew it not) forever. I could not 
reverence him intellectually; but he had been uniformly kind 
to me, and had allowed me many indulgences; and I grieved 
at the thought of the mortification I should inflict upon him. 

The morning came, which was to launch me into the world, 
and from which my whole succeeding life has, in many impor- 
tant points, taken its coloring. I lodged in the head-master's 
house, and had been allowed, from my first entrance, the 
indulgence of a private room, which I used both as a sleeping 
room and as a study. At half after three I rose, and gazed 
with deep emotion at the ancient towers of , " drest in ear- 
liest light," and beginning to crimson with the radiant lustre 
of a cloudless July morning. I was firm and immovable in 
my purpose, but yet agitated by anticipation of uncertain 
danger and troubles; and if I could have foreseen the hurri- 
cane, and perfect hail-storm of affliction, which soon fell upon 
me, well might I have been agitated. To this agitation the 
deep peace of the morning presented an affecting contrast, 
and in some degree a medicine. The silence was more pro- 
found than that of midnight: and to me the silence of a sum- 
mer morning is more touching than all other silence, because, 
the light being broad and strong, as that of noon-day at other 



6 DE QUINCEY 

seasons of the year, it seems to differ from perfect day chiefly 
because man is not yet abroad ; and thus, the peace of nature, 
and of the innocent creatures of God, seems to be secure and 
deep, only so long as the presence of man, and his restless 
and unquiet spirit, are not there to trouble its sanctity. I 
dressed myself, took my hat and gloves, and lingered a little 
in the room. For the last year and a half this room had been 
my " pensive citadel : " here I had read and studied through 
all the hours of night; and, though true it was, that, for the 
latter part of this time, I, who was framed for love and gentle 
affections, had lost my gayety and happiness, during the strife 
and fever of contention with my guardian, yet, on the other 
hand, as a boy so passionately fond of books, and dedicated 
to intellectual pursuits, I could not fail to have enjoyed many 
happy hours in the midst of general dejection. I wept as I 
looked round on the chair, hearth, writing-table, and other 
familiar objects, knowing too certainly that I looked upon 
them for the last time. Whilst I write this, it is eighteen 
years ago; and yet, ^t this moment, I see distinctly, as if it 
were but yesterday, the lineaments and expressions of the 
object on which I fixed my parting gaze: it was a picture of 

the lovely , which hung over the mantel-piece; the eyes 

and mouth of which were so beautiful, and the whole counte- 
nance so radiant with benignity and divine tranquility, that I 
had a thousand times laid down my pen, or my book, to 
gather consolation from it, as a devotee from his patron saint. 

Whilst I was yet gazing upon it, the deep tones of clock 

proclaimed that it was four o'clock. I went up to the picture, 
kissed it, and then gently walked out, and closed the door 
forever ! 

So blended and intertwisted in this life are occasions of 
laughter and of tears, that I cannot yet recall, without smiling, 
an incident which occurred at that time, and which had nearly 
put a stop to the immediate execution of my plan. I had a 
trunk of immense weight; for, besides my clothes, it con- 
tained nearly all my library. The difficulty was to get this 
removed to a carrier's; my room was at an aerial elevation 
in the house, and (what was worse) the staircase which com- 
municated with this angle of the building was accessible only 
by a gallery, which passed the head-master's chamber-door. 
I was a favorite with all the servants; and knowing that any 
of them would screen me, and act confidentially, I communi- 
cated my embarrassment to a groom of the head-master's. 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER ^ 

The groom swore he would do anything I wished; and, when 
the time arrived, went up stairs to bring the trunk down. 
This I feared was beyond the strength of any one man: how- 
ever, the groom was a man 

" Of Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear 
The weight of mightiest monarchies;" 

and had a back as spacious as SaHsbury Plains. Accordingly 
he persisted in bringing down the trunk alone, whilst I stood 
waiting at the foot of the last flight, in anxiety for the event. 
For some time I heard him descending with slow and firm 
steps; but, unfortunately, from his trepidation, as he drew 
near the dangerous quarter, within a few steps of the gallery, 
his foot slipped; and the mighty burden, faUing from his shoul- 
ders, gained such increase of impetus at each step of the 
descent, that, on reaching the bottom, it trundled, or rather 
leaped, right across, with the noise of twenty devils, against 
the very bed-room door of the archididascalus. My first 
thought was, that all was lost; and that my only chance for 
executing a retreat was to sacrifice my baggage. However, 
on reflection, I determined to abide the issue. The groom 
was in the utmost alarm, both on his own account and on 
mine- but, in spite of this, so irresistibly had the sense of the 
ludicrous, in this unhappy contretemps, taken possession of 
his fancy, that he sang out a long, loud, and canorous peal of 
laughter, that might have wakened the Seven Sleepers. At 
the sound of this resonant merriment, within the very ears of 
insulted authority, I could not forbear joining in it, subdued 
to this, not so much by the unhappy etourderie of the trunk, 
as by the efifect it had upon the groom. We both expected, 

as a matter of course, that Dr. would sally out of his 

room; for, in general, if but a mouse stirred, he sprang out 
like a mastiff from his kennel. Strange to say, however, on 
this occasion, when the noise of laughter had ceased, no sound 
or rusthng even, was to be heard in the bed-room. Dr. -— 
had a painful complaint, which sometimes keeping him awake 
made him sleep, perhaps, when it did come, the deeper. 
Gathering courage from the silence, the groom hoisted his 
burden again, and accomplished the remainder of his descent 
without accident. I waited until I saw the trunk placed on a 
wheelbarrow, and on its road to the carrier's: then, with 
Providence my guide," I set off on foot, carrying a small 
parcel, with some articles of dress under my arm: a favorite 



8 DE QUINCEY 

English poet in one pocket; and a small twelvemo volume, 
containing about nine plays of Euripides, in the other. 

It had been my intention, originally, to proceed to West- 
moreland, both from the love I bore to that county, and on 
other personal accounts. Accident, however, gave a differ- 
ent direction to my wanderings, and I bent my steps towards 
North Wales. 

After wandering about for some time in Denbighshire, 
Merionethshire, and Caernarvonshire, I took lodgings in a 

small neat house in B . Here I might have staid with 

great comfort for many weeks; for provisions were cheap at 

B , from the scarcity of other markets for the surplus 

products of a wide agricultural district. An accident, how- 
ever, in which, perhaps, no offence was designed, drove me 
out to wander again. I know not whether my reader may 
have remarked, but I have often remarked, that the proudest 
class of people in England (or, at any rate, the class whose 
pride is most apparent) are the families of bishops. Noble- 
men, and their children, carry about with them, in their very 
titles, a sufficient notification of their rank. Nay, their very 
names (and this applies also to the children of many unti- 
tled houses) are often, to the Enghsh ear, adequate exponents 
of high birth, or descent. Sackville, Manners, Fitzroy, Paulet, 
Cavendish, and scores of others, tell their own tale. Such 
persons, therefore, find everywhere a due sense of their claims 
already established, except among those who are ignorant of 
the world, by virtue of their own obscurity ; " Not to know 
them argues one's self unknown." Their manners take a 
suitable tone and coloring; and, for once that they find it 
necessary to impress a sense of their consequence upon others, 
they meet with a thousand occasions for moderating and tem- 
pering this sense by acts of courteous condescension. With 
the families of bishops it is otherwise; with them it is all 
up-hill work to make known their pretensions; for the pro- 
portion of the episcopal bench taken from noble families is 
not at any time very large; and the succession to these digni- 
ties is so rapid, that the public ear seldom has time to become 
familiar with them, unless where they are connected with 
some literary reputation. Hence it is that the children of 
bishops carry about with them an austere and repulsive air, 
indicative of claims not generally acknowledged, — a sort of 
noli me tangere manner, nervously apprehensive of too familiar 
approach, and shrinking with the sensitiveness of a gouty man, 
from all contact with the oi noUot, Doubtless, a powerful 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 9 

understanding, or unusual goodness of nature, will preserve 
a man from such weakness; but, in general, the truth of my 
representation will be acknowledged; pride, if not of deeper 
root in such families, appears, at least, more upon the surface 
of their manners. This spirit of manners naturally communi- 
cates itself to their domestics, and other dependants. Now, 
my landlady had been a lady's maid, or a nurse, in the family 

of the Bishop of ; and had but lately married away and 

" settled '^ (as such people express it) for life. In a Httle town 
like B , merely to have lived in the bishop's family con- 
ferred some distinction; and my good landlady had rather 
more than her share of the pride I have noticed on that score. 
What "my lord" said, and what "my lord" did, — how 
useful he was in parliament, and how indispensable at 
Oxford, — formed the daily burden of her talk. All this I 
bore very well; for I was too good-natured to laugh in any- 
body's face, and I could make an ample allowance for the 
garrulity of an old servant. Of necessity, however, I must 
have appeared in her eyes very inadequately impressed with 
the bishop's importance; and, perhaps, to punish me for my 
indifference, or, possibly, by accident, she one day repeated 
to me a conversation in -which I was indirectly a party con- 
cerned. She had been to the palace to pay her respects to 
the family, and, dinner being over, was summoned into the 
dining-room. In giving an account of her household econ- 
omy she happened to mention that she had let her apartments. 
Thereupon the good bishop (it seemed) had taken occasion 
to caution her as to her selection of inmates; "for," said he, 
" you must recollect, Betty, that this place is in the high road 
to the Head; so that multitudes of Irish swindlers, running, 
away from their debts into England, and of English swindlers, 
running away from their debts to the Isle of Man, are likely 
to take this place in their route." This advice was certainly 
not without reasonable grounds, but rather fitted to be stored 
up for Mrs, Betty's private meditations, than specially reported 
to me. What followed, however, was somewhat worse: — 
" O, my lord," answered my landlady (according to her own 
representation of the matter), " I really don't think this young 

gentleman is a swindler; because ." "You don't think 

me a swindler?" said I, interrupting her, in a tumult of indig- 
nation; "for the future, I shall spare you the trouble of think- 
ing about it." And without delay I prepared for rny depart- 
ure. Some concessions the good woman seemed disposed to 
make; but a harsh and contemptuous expression, which I 



lO DE QUINCEY 

fear that I applied to the learned dignitary himself, roused 
her indignation in turn; and reconciliation then became impos- 
sible. I was, indeed, greatly irritated at the bishop's having 
suggested any grounds of suspicion, however remotely, 
against a person whom he had never seen; and I thought of 
letting him know my mind in Greek ; which, at the same time 
that it would furnish some presumption that I was no swindler, 
would also (I hoped) compel the bishop to reply in the same 
language, in which case, I doubted not to make it appear, that 
if I was not so rich as his lordship, I was a far better Grecian. 
Calmer thoughts, however, drove this boyish design out of 
my mind: for I considered that the bishop was in the right 
to counsel an old servant; that he could not have designed that 
his advice should be reported to me ; and that the same coarse- 
ness of mind which had led Mrs. Betty to repeat the advice 
at all might have colored it in a way more agreeable to her 
own style of thinking than to the actual expressions of the 
worthy bishop. 

I left the lodging the very same hour; and this turned out 
a very unfortunate occurrence for me, because, Hving hence- 
forward at inns, I was drained of my money very rapidly. In 
a fortnight I w*as reduced to a short allowance; that is, I could 
allow myself only one meal a day. From the keen appetite 
produced by constant exercise and mountain air, acting on a 
youthful stomach, I soon began to sufifer greatly on this 
slender regimen; for the single meal which I could venture 
to order was coffee or tea. Even this, however, was at length 
withdrawn; and, afterwards, so long as I remained in Wales, 
I subsisted either on blackberries, hips, haws, etc., or on the 
casual hospitalities which I now and then received, in return 
for such little services as I had an opportunity of rendering. 
Sometimes I wrote letters of business for cottagers who hap- 
pened to have relatives in Liverpool or in London; more 
often I wrote love-letters to their sweethearts for young 
women who had lived as servants in Shrewsbury, or other 
towns on the English border. On all such occasions I gave 
great satisfaction to my humble friends, and was generally 
treated with hospitality; and once, in particular, near the 
village of Llan-y-styndwr (or some such name), in a seques- 
tered part of Merionethshire, I was entertained for upwards 
of three days by a family of young people, with an affectionate 
and fraternal kindness that left an impression upon my heart 
not yet impaired. The family consisted, at that time, of four 
sisters and three brothers, all grown up, and remarkable for 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 1 1 

elegance and delicacy of manners. So much beauty, and so 
much native good breeding and refinement, I do not remem- 
ber to have seen before or since in any cottage, except once 
or twice in Westmoreland and Devonshire. They spoke 
English; an accomplishment not often met with in so many 
members of one family, especially in villages remote from the 
high road. Here I wrote, on my first introduction, a letter 
about prize-money, for one of the brothers, who had served 
on board an English man-of-war; and, more privately, two 
love-letters for two of the sisters. They were both interesting 
looking girls, and one of uncommon loveliness. In the midst 
of their confusion and blushes, whilst dictating, or rather 
giving me general instructions, it did not require any great 
penetration to discover that what they wished was that their 
letters should be as kind as was consistent with proper maid- 
enly pride. I contrived so to temper my expressions as to 
reconcile the gratification of both feelings; and they were 
much pleased with the way in which I had expressed their 
thoughts, as (in their simplicity) they were astonished at my 
having so readily discovered them. The reception one meets 
with from the women of a family generally determines the 
tenor of one's whole entertainment. In this case I had dis- 
charged my confidential duties as secretary so much to the 
general satisfaction, perhaps also amusing them with my 
conversation, that I was pressed to stay with a cordiality which 
I had little inclination to resist. I slept with the brothers, the 
only unoccupied bed standing in the apartment of the young 
women: but in all other points they treated me with a respect 
not usually paid to purses as light as mine; as if my scholar- 
ship were sufficient evidence that I was of ** gentle blood." 
Thus I lived with them for three days, and great part of a 
fourth; and, from the undiminished kindness which they con- 
tinued to show me, I believe I might have staid with them 
up to this time, if their power had corresponded with their 
wishes. On the last morning, however, I perceived upon 
their countenances, as they sat at breakfast, the expression 
of some unpleasant communication which was at hand; and 
soon after, one of the brothers explained to me, that their 
parents had gone, the day before my arrival, to an annual 
meeting of Methodists, held at Caernarvon, and were that day 
expected to return ; " and if they should not be so civil as 
they ought to be," he begged, on the part of all the young 
people, that I would not take it amiss. The parents returned 
with churlish faces, and " Dym Sassenach" (no English) in 



12 DE QUINCEY 

answer to all my addresses. I saw how matters stood; and 
so, taking an affectionate leave of my kind and interesting 
young folks, I went my way. For, though they spoke warmly 
to their parents in my behalf, and often excused the manner 
of the old people, by saying that it was " only their way," yet 
I easily understood that my talent for writing love-letters 
would do as little to recommend me with two grave sexage- 
narian Welsh Methodists as my Greek Sapphics or Alcaics; 
and what had been hospitality when offered to me with the 
gracious courtesy of my young friends, would become charity, 
when connected with the harsh demeanor of these old people. 
Certainly, Mr. Shelley is right in his notions about old age; 
unless powerfully counteracted by all sorts of opposite agen- 
cies, it is a miserable corrupter and blighter to the genial 
charities of the human heart. 

Soon after this, I contrived, by means which I must omit 
for want of room, to transfer myself to London. And now 
began the latter and fiercer stage of my long sufferings; with- 
out using a disproportionate expression, I might say, of my 
agony. For I now suffered, for upwards of sixteen weeks, 
the physical anguish of hunger in various degrees of intensity; 
but as bitter, perhaps, as ever any human being can have suf- 
fered who has survived it. I would not needlessly harass my 
reader's feelings by a detail of all that I endured; for extremi- 
ties such as these, under any circumstances of heaviest miscon- 
duct or guilt, cannot be contemplated, even in description, 
without a rueful pity that is painful to the natural goodness of 
the human heart. Let it suffice, at least on this occasion, to 
say, that a few fragments of bread from the breakfast-table of 
one individual (who supposed me to be ill, but did not know 
of my being in utter want), and these at uncertain intervals, 
constituted my whole support. During the former part of 
my sufferings (that is, generally in Wales, and always for the 
first two months in London), I was houseless, and very seldom 
slept under a roof. To this constant exposure to the open air 
I ascribe it mainly, that I did not sink under my torments. 
Latterly, however, when cold and more inclement weather 
came on, and when, from the length of my sufferings, I had 
begun to sink into a more languishing condition, it was, no 
doubt, fortunate for me, that the same person to whose break- 
fast-table I had access allowed me to sleep in a large, unoccu- 
pied house, of which he was tenant. Unoccupied, I call it, 
for there was no household or establishment in it; nor any 
furniture, indeed, except a table and a few chairs. But I 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER 13 

found, on taking possession of my new quarters, that the 
house already contained one single inmate, a poor, friendless 
child, apparently ten years old; but she seemed hunger-bitten; 
and sufferings of that sort often make children look older 
than they are. From this forlorn child I learned, that she had 
slept and lived there alone, for some time before I came; and 
great joy the poor creature expressed, when she found that 
I was in future to be her companion through the hours of 
darkness. The house was large; and, from the want of fur- 
niture, the noise of the rats made a prodigious echoing on 
the spacious staircase and hall; and, amidst the real fleshly 
ills of cold, and, I fear, hunger, the forsaken child had found 
leisure to suffer still more (it appeared) from the self-created 
one of ghosts. I promised her protection against all ghosts 
whatsoever; but, alas! I could offer her no other assistance. 
We lay upon the floor, with a bundle of cursed law papers for 
a pillow, but with no other covering than a sort of large 
horseman's cloak; afterwards, however, we discovered, in a 
garret, an old sofa-cover, a small piece of rug, and some frag- 
ments of other articles, which added a little to our warmth. 
The poor child crept close to me for warmth, and for security 
against her ghostly enemies. When I was not more than 
usually ill, I took her into my arms, so that, in general, she 
was tolerably warm, and often slept when I could not; for, 
during the last two months of my sufiferings, I slept much in 
the daytime, and was apt to fall into transient dozings at all 
hours. But my sleep distressed me more than my watching; 
for, besides the tumultuousness of my dreams (which were 
only not so awful as those which I shall have to describe 
hereafter as produced by opium), my sleep was never more 
than what is called dog-sleep; so that I could hear myself 
moaning, and was often, as it seemed to me, awakened sud- 
denly by my own voice ; and, about this time, a hideous sensa- 
tion began to haunt me as soon as I fell into a slumber, which 
has since returned upon me, at different periods of my life, 
namely, a sort of twitching (I know not where, but apparently 
about the region of the stomach), which compelled me vio- 
lently to throw out my feet for the sake of relieving it. This 
sensation coming on as soon as I began to sleep, and the 
effort to relieve it constantly awaking me, at length I slept only 
from exhaustion; and, from increasing weakness (as I said 
before), I was constantly falling asleep, and constantly awak- 
ing. Meantime, the master of the house sometimes came in 
upon us suddenly, and very early; sometimes not till ten 



14 DE QUINCEY 

o'clock; sometimes not at all. He was in constant fear of 
bailiffs; improving on the plan of Cromwell, every night he 
slept in a different quarter of London ; and I observed that he 
never failed to examine, through a private window, the appear- 
ance of those who knocked at the door, before he would allow 
it to be opened. He breakfasted alone; indeed, his tea equip- 
age would hardly have admitted of his hazarding an invitation 
to a second person, any more than the quantity of esculent 
material, which, for the most part, was little more than a roll, 
or a few biscuits, which he had bought on his road from the 
place where he had slept. Or, if he had asked a party, as I 
once learnedly and facetiously observed to him, the several 
members of it must have stood in the relation to each other 
(not sat in any relation whatever) of succession, as the meta- 
physicians have it, and not of coexistence; in the relation of 
parts of time, and not of the parts of space. During his 
breakfast, I generally contrived a reason for lounging in ; and, 
with an air of as much indifference as I could assume, took 
up such fragments as he had left, — sometimes, indeed, there 
were none at all. In doing this, I committed no robbery, 
except upon the man himself, who was thus obHged (I believe), 
now and then, to send out at noon for an extra biscuit ; for, as 
to the poor child, she was never admitted into his study (if I 
may give that name to his chief depository of parchments, 
law writings, etc.) ; that room was to her the Blue-beard room 
of the house, being regularly locked on his departure to din- 
ner, about six o'clock, which usually was his final departure 
for the night. Whether this child was an illegitimate daugh- 
ter of Mr. , or only a servant, I could not ascertain; she 

did not herself know; but certainly she was treated altogether 

as a menial servant. No sooner did Mr. make his 

appearance, than she went below stairs, brushed his shoes, 
coat, etc.; and, except when she was summoned to run an 
errand, she never emerged from the dismal Tartarus of the 
kitchens, to the upper air, until my welcome knock at night 
called up her little trembling footsteps to the front door. Of 
her life during the daytime, however, I knew little, but what 
I gathered from her own account at night; for, as soon as 
the hours of business commenced, I saw that my absence 
would be acceptable; and, in general, therefore, I went off and 
sat in the parks, or elsewhere, until night-fall. 

But who, and what, meantime, was the master of the house, 
himself? Reader, he was one of those anomalous practition- 
ers in lower departments of the law, who — what shall I 



1 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 15 

say? — who, on prudential reasons, or from necessity, deny 
themselves all the indulgence in the luxury of too delicate a 
conscience (a periphrasis which might be abridged consid- 
erably, but that I leave to the reader's taste); in many walks 
of life, a conscience is a more expensive incumbrance than a 
wife or a carriage; and just as people talk of " laying down " 

their carriages, so I suppose my friend, Mr. , had "laid 

down" his conscience for a time; meaning, doubtless, to 
resume it as soon as he could afford it. The inner economy 
of such a man's daily life would present a most strange pic- 
ture, if I could allow myself to amuse the reader at his 
expense. Even with my limited opportunities for observing 
what went on, I saw many scenes of London intrigues, and 
complex chicanery, " cycle and epicycle, orb in orb," at which 
I sometimes smile to this day, and at which I smiled then, 
in spite of my misery. My situation, however, at that time, 
gave me little experience, in my own person, of any qualities 

in Mr. 's character but such as did him honor; and of 

his whole strange composition, I must forget everything but 
that towards me he was obliging, and, to the extent of his 
power, generous. 

That power was not, indeed, very extensive. However, 
in common with the rats, I sat rent free; and as Dr. Johnson 
has recorded that he never but once in his life had as much 
wall-fruit as he could eat, so let me be grateful that, on that 
single occasion, I had as large a choice of apartments in a 
London mansion as I could possibly desire. Except the 
Blue-beard room, which the poor child beUeved to be haunted, 
all others, from the attics to the cellars, were at our service. 
" The world was all before us," and we pitched our tent for 
the night in any spot we chose. This house I have already 
described as a large one. It stands in a conspicuous situa- 
tion, and in a well-known part of London. Many of my read- 
ers will have passed it, I doubt not, within a few hours of 
reading this. For myself, I never fail to visit it when business 
draws me to London. About ten o'clock this very night, 
August 15, 1 82 1, being my birthday, I turned aside from my 
evening walk, down Oxford-street, purposely to take a glance 
at it. It is now occupied by a respectable family, and, by the 
lights in the front drawing-room, I observed a domestic party, 
assembled, perhaps, at tea, and apparently cheerful and gay; -^ 
marvellous contrast, in my eyes, to the darkness, cold, silence, 
and desolation, of that same house eighteen years ago, when 
its nightly occupants were one famishing scholar and a 



1 6 DE QUINCEY 

neglected child. Her, by the by, in after years, I vainly 
endeavored to trace. Apart from her situation, she was not 
what would be called an interesting child. She was neither 
pretty, nor quick in understanding, nor remarkably pleasing 
in manners. But, thank God, even in those years I needed 
not the embellishments of novel accessories to conciliate my 
affections. Plain human nature, in its humblest and most 
homely apparel, was enough for me; and I loved the child 
because she was my partner in wretchedness. If she is now 
living, she is probably a mother, with children of her own; 
but, as I have said, I could never trace her. 

This I regret; but another person there was, at that time, 
whom I have since sought to trace, with far deeper earnest- 
ness, and with far deeper sorrow at my failure. This person 
was a young woman, and one of that unhappy class who sub- 
sist upon the wages of prostitution. I feel no shame, nor have 
any reason to feel it, in avowing, that I was then on famihar and 
friendly terms with many women in that unfortunate condition. 
The reader needs neither smile at this avowal, nor frown; for 
not to remind my classical readers of the old Latin proverb, 
'' Sine cerere," etc., it may well be supposed that in the exist- 
ing state of my purse my connection with such women could 
not have been an impure one. But the truth is, that at no 
time of my life have I been a person to hold myself polluted 
by the touch or approach of any creature that wore a human 
shape. On the contrary, from my very earliest youth, it has 
been my pride to converse familiarly, more Socratico, with all 
human beings, — man, woman, and child, — that chance 
might fling in my way: a practice which is friendly to the 
knowledge of human nature, to good feelings, and to that 
frankness of address which becomes a man who would be 
thought a philosopher; for a philosopher should not see with 
the eyes of the poor limitary creature calling himself a man 
of the world, and filled with narrow and self-regarding preju- 
dices of birth and education, but should look upon himself as 
a catholic creature, and as standing in an equal relation to 
high and low, to educated and uneducated, to the guilty and 
the innocent. Being myself, at that time, of necessity, a peri- 
patetic, or a walker of the streets, I naturally fell in, more 
frequently, with those female peripatetics, who are technically 
called street-walkers. Many of these women had occasionally 
taken my part against watchmen who wished to drive me off 
the steps of houses where I was sitting. But one amongst 
them, — the one on whose account I have at all introduced 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 1 7 

this subject, — yet no! let me not class thee, oh, noble-minded 

Ann , with that order of women; — let me find, if it be 

possible, some gentler name to designate the condition of her 
to whose bounty and compassion — ministering to my neces- 
sities when all the world had forsaken me — I owe it that I 
am at this time alive. For many weeks, I had walked, at 
nights, with this poor friendless girl, up and down Oxford- 
street, or had rested with her on steps and under the shelter 
of porticoes. She could not be so old as myself: she told me, 
indeed, that she had not completed her sixteenth year. By 
such questions as my interest about her prompted, I had 
gradually drawn forth her simple history. Hers was a case 
of ordinary occurrence (as I have since had reason to think), 
and one in which, if London beneficence had better adapted 
its arrangements to meet it, the power of the law might oftener 
be interposed to protect and to avenge. But the stream of 
London charity flows in a channel which, though deep and 
mighty, is yet noiseless and under ground ; — not obvious or 
readily accessible to poor, houseless wanderers; and it cannot 
be denied that the outside air and frame-work of London 
society is harsh, cruel, and repulsive. In any case, however, 
I saw that part of her injuries might easily have been re- 
dressed; and I urged her often and earnestly to lay her com- 
plaint before a magistrate. Friendless as she was, I assured 
her that she would meet with immediate attention; and that 
English justice, which was no respecter of persons, would 
speedily and amply avenge her on the brutal ruffian who had 
plundered her little property. She promised me often that 
she would; but she delayed taking the steps I pointed out, 
from time to time; for she was timid and dejected to a degree 
which showed how deeply sorrow had taken hold of her young 
heart; and perhaps she thought justly that the most upright 
judge and the most righteous tribunals could do nothing to 
repair her heaviest wrongs. Something, however, w^ould per- 
haps have been done; for it had been settled between us, at 
length, — but, unhappily, on the very last time but one that 
I was ever to see her, — that in a day or two we should speak 
on her behalf. This little service it was destined, however, 
that I should never reaUze. Meantime, that which she ren- 
dered to me, and which was greater than I could ever have 
repaid her, was this: — One night, when we were pacing 
slowly along Oxford-street, and after a day when I had felt 
unusually ill and faint, I requested her to turn oflf with me 
into Soho-square. Thither we went; and we sat down on 



1 8 DE QUINCEY 

the steps of a house, which, to this hour, I never pass without 
a pang of grief, and an inner act of homage to the spirit of 
that unhappy girl, in memory of the noble act which she there 
performed. Suddenly, as we sat, I grew much worse. I had 
been leaning my head against her bosom, and all at once I 
sank from her arms and fell backward on the steps. From 
the sensations I then had, I felt an inner conviction of the live- 
liest kind, that without some powerful and reviving stimulus 
I should either have died on the spot, or should, at least, have 
sunk to a point of exhaustion from which all reascent, under 
my friendless circumstances, would soon have become hope- 
less. Then it was, at this crisis of my fate, that my poor 
orphan companion, who had herself met with little but injuries 
in this world, stretched out a saving hand to me. Uttering 
a cry of terror, but without a moment's delay, she ran ofif into 
Oxford-street, and in less time than could be imagined 
returned to me with a glass of port-wine and spices, that 
acted upon my empty stomach (which at that time would have 
rejected all solid food) with an instantaneous power of restora- 
tion; and for this glass the generous girl, without a murmur, 
paid out of her own humble purse, at a time, be it remem- 
bered, when she had scarcely wherewithal to purchase the 
bare necessaries of Hfe, and when she could have no reason to 
expect that I should ever be able to reimburse her. O, youth- 
ful benefactress! how often, in succeeding years, standing in 
solitary places, and thinking of thee with grief of heart and 
perfect love, — how often have I wished that, as in ancient 
times the curse of a father was believed to have a supernatural 
power, and to pursue its object with a fatal necessity of self- 
fulfilment, — even so the benediction of a heart oppressed 
with gratitude might have a like prerogative; might have 
power given to it from above to chase, to haunt, to waylay,' 
to overtake, to pursue thee into the central darkness of a 
London brothel, or (if it were possible) into the darkness of 
the grave, there to awaken thee with an authentic message of 
peace and forgiveness, and of final reconciliation! 

I do not often weep; for not only do my thoughts on sub- 
jects connected with the chief interests of man daily, nay, 
hourly, descend a thousand fathoms "too deep for tears ; " 
not only does the sternness of my habits of thought present an 
antagonism to the feelings which prompt tears, — wanting, 
of necessity, to those who, being protected usually by their 
levity from any tendency to meditative sorrow, would, by 
that same levity, be made incapable of resisting it on any 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 1 9 

casual access of such feelings; but also, I believe, that all 
minds which have contemplated such objects as deeply as I 
have done, must, for their own protection from utter despond- 
ency, have early encouraged and cherished some tranquilizing 
belief as to the future balances and the hieroglyphic meanings 
of human sufferings. On these accounts I am cheerful to 
this hour; and, as I have said, I do not often weep. Yet some 
feelings, though not deeper or more passionate, are more 
tender than others; and often, when I walk, at this time, in 
Oxford-street, by dreamy lamp-light, and hear those airs 
played on a barrel-organ which years ago solaced me and my 
dear companion (as I must always call her), I shed tears, and 
muse with myself at the mysterious dispensation which so 
suddenly and so critically separated us forever. How it hap- 
pened, the reader will understand from what remains of this 
introductory narration. 

Soon after the period of the last incident I have recorded, 
I met, in Albemarle-street, a gentleman of his late Majesty's 
household. This gentleman had received hospitalities, on 
different occasions, from my family; and he challenged me 
upon the strength of my family likeness. I did not attempt 
any disguise; I answered , his questions ingeniously, and, on 
his pledging his word of honour that he would not betray me 
to my guardians, I gave him an address to my friend, the 
attorney. The next day I received from him a ten-pound 
bank note. The letter enclosing it was delivered, with other 
letters of business, to the attorney; but, though his look and 
manner informed me that he suspected its contents, he gave 
it up to me honourably and without demur. 

This present, from the particular service to which it was 
applied, leads me naturally to speak of the purpose which 
had allured me up to London, and which I had been (to use 
a forensic word) soliciting from the first day of my arrival in 
London, to that of my final departure. 

In so mighty a world as London, it will surprise my readers 
that I should not have found some means of staving off the 
last extremities of penury; and it will strike them that two 
resources, at least, must have been open to me, namely, either 
to seek assistance from the friends of my family, or to turn my 
youthful talents and attainments into some channel of pecu- 
niary emolument. As to the first course, I may observe, 
generally, that what I dreaded beyond all other evils was the 
chance of being reclaimed by my guardians; not doubting 
that whatever power the law gave them would have been 



20 DE QUINCEY 

enforced against me to the utmost; that is, to the extremity 
of forcibly restoring me to the school which I had quitted; 
a restoration which, as it would, in my eyes, have been a dis- 
honour, even if submitted to voluntarily, could not fail, when 
extorted from me in contempt and defiance of my own wishes 
and efforts, to have been a humiliation worse to me than 
death, and which would indeed have terminated in death. I 
was, therefore, shy enough of applying for assistance even 
in those quarters where I was sure of receiving it, at the risk 
of furnishing my guardians with any clue for recovering me. 
But, as to London in particular, though doubtless my father 
had in his lifetime had many friends there, yet (as ten years 
had passed since his death) I remembered few of them even 
by name; and never having seen London before, except once 
for a few hours, I knew not the address of even those few. 
To this mode of gaining help, therefore, in part the difficulty, 
but much more the paramount fear which I have mentioned, 
habitually indisposed me in regard to the other mode, I now 
feel half inclined to join my reader in wondering that I should 
have overlooked it. As a corrector of Greek proofs (if in 
no other way), I might, doubtless, have gained enough for 
my slender wants. Such an office as this I could have dis- 
charged with an exemplary and punctual accuracy that would 
soon have gained me the confidence of my employers. But 
it must not be forgotten that even for such an office as this, 
it was necessary that I should first of all have an introduction 
to some respectable publisher; and this I had no means of 
obtaining. To say the truth, however, it had never once 
occurred to me to think of literary labors as a source of profit. 
No mode sufficiently speedy of obtaining money had ever 
occurred to me, but that of borrowing it on the strength of 
my future claims and expectations. This mode I sought by 
every avenue to compass; and amongst other persons I 

applied to a Jew ^ named D J^ 

To this Jew, and to other advertising money-lenders (some 
of whom were, I believe, also Jews), I had introduced myself, 
with an account of my expectations ; which account, on exam- 
ining my father's will at Doctor's Commons, they had ascer- 
tained to be correct. The person there mentioned as the 

second son of was found to have all the claims (or more 

than all) that I had stated: but one question still remained, 
which the faces of the Jews pretty significantly suggested, — 
was I that person? This doubt had never occurred to me as 
a possible one; I had rather feared, whenever my Jewish 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 2 1 

friends scrutinized me keenly, that I might be too well known 
to be that person, and that some scheme might be passing in 
their minds for entrapping me and selling me to my guard- 
ians. It was strange to me to find my own self, materialiter 
considered (so I expressed it, for I doted on logical accuracy 
of distinctions), accused, or at least suspected, of counterfeit- 
ing my own self, formaliter considered. However, to satisfy 
their scruples, I took the only course in my power. Whilst 
I was in Wales, I had received various letters from young 
friends : these I produced, — for I carried them constantly in 
my pocket, — being, indeed, by this time, almost the only 
relics of my personal incumbrances (excepting the clothes I 
w^ore), which I had not in one way or other ^ disposed of. 

Most of these letters were from the Earl of ,' who was, at 

that time, my chief (or rather only) confidential friend. These 
letters were dated from Eton. I had also some from the 
Marquis of ,' his father, who, though absorbed in agricul- 
tural pursuits, yet having been an Etonian himself, and as 
good a scholar as a nobleman needs to be, still retained an 
affection for classical studies and for youthful scholars. He 
had, accordingly, from the time that I was fifteen, corre- 
sponded with me; sometimes upon the great improvements 
which he had made, or was meditating, in the counties of 

M and SI ' since I had been there; sometimes upon 

the merits of a Latin poet; at other times, suggesting subjects 
to me on which he wished me to write verses. 

On reading the letters, one of my Jewish friends agreed to 
furnish two or three hundred pounds on my personal security, 
provided I could persuade the young earl,— who was, by 
the way, not older than myself, — to guarantee the payment 
on our coming of age: the Jew's final object being, as I now 
suppose, not the trifling profit he could expect to make by me, 
but the prospect of establishing a connection with my noble 
friend, whose immense expectations were well known to him. 
In pursuance of this proposal on the part of the Jew, about 
eight or nine days after I had received the ten pounds, I pre- 
pared to go down to Eton. Nearly three pounds of the 
money I had given to my money-lending friend, on his alleg- 
ing that the stamps must be bought, in order that the writings 
might be prepared whilst I was away from London. I thought 
in my heart that he was lying; but I did not wish to give him 
any excuse for charging his own delays upon me. A smaller 
sum I had given to my friend the attorney (who was con- 
nected with the money-lenders as their lawyer), to which, 



22 DE QUINCEY 

indeed, he was entitled for his unfurnished lodgings. About 
fifteen shillings I had employed in reestablishing (though in 
a very humble way) my dress. Of the remainder, I gave one- 
quarter to Ann, meaning, on my return, to have divided with 
her whatever might remain. These arrangements made, soon 
after six o'clock, on a dark winter evening, I set off, accom- 
panied by Ann, towards Piccadilly; for it was my intention to 
go down as far as Salt Hill on the Bath or Bristol mail. Our 
course lay through a part of the town which has now all dis- 
appeared, so that I can no longer retrace its ancient bound- 
aries: Swallow-street, I think it was called. Having time 
enough before us, however, we bore away to the left, until 
we came into Golden-square: there, near the corner of Sher- 
rard-street, we sat down, not wishing to part in the tumult 
and blaze of Piccadilly. I had told her of my plans some 
time before; and now I assured her again that she should 
share in my good fortune, if I met with any ; and that I would 
never forsake her, as soon as I had power to protect her. 
This I fully intended, as much from inclination as from a 
sense of duty; for, setting aside gratitude, which, in any case, 
must have made me her debtor for life, I loved her as affection- 
ately as if she had been my sister; and at this moment with 
seven-fold tenderness, from pity at witnessing her extreme 
dejection. I had, apparently, most reason for dejection, 
because I was leaving the saviour of my life; yet I, consider- 
ing the shock my health had received, was cheerful and full 
of hope. She, on the contrary, who was parting with one who 
had had little means of serving her, except by kindness and 
brotherly treatment, was overcome by sorrow; so that, when 
I kissed her at our final farewell, she put her arms about my 
neck, and wept, without speaking a word. I hoped to return 
in a week at furthest, and I agreed with her that on the fifth 
night from that, and every night afterwards, she should wait 
for me, at six o'clock, near the bottom of Great Titchfield- 
street, which had been our customary haven, as it were, of 
rendezvous, to prevent our missing each other in the great 
Mediterranean of Oxford-street. This, and other measures 
of precaution, I took: one, only, I forgot. She had either 
never told me, or (as a matter of no great interest) I had for- 
gotten, her surname. It is a general practice, indeed, with 
girls of humble rank in her unhappy condition, not (as novel- 
reading women of higher pretensions) to style themselves 
Miss Douglass, Miss Montague, etc., but simply by their Chris- 
tian names, Mary, Jane, Frances, etc. Her surname, as the 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 23 

surest means of tracing her, I ought now to have inquired; 
but the truth is, having no reason to think that our meeting 
could, in consequence of a short interruption, be more difficult 
or uncertain than it had been for so many weeks, I had scarcely 
for a moment adverted to it as necessary, or placed it amongst 
my memoranda against this parting interview; and my final 
anxieties being spent in comforting her with hopes, and in 
pressing upon her the necessity of getting some medicine for 
a violent cough and hoarseness with which she was troubled, 
I wholly forgot it until it was too late to recall her. 

It was past eight o'clock when I reached the Gloucester 
Cofifee-House, and the Bristol Mail being on the point of 
going off, I mounted on the outside. The fine fluent motion '' 
of this mail soon laid me asleep. It is somewhat remarkable 
that the first easy or refreshing sleep which I had enjoyed for 
some months was on the outside of a mail-coach, — a bed 
which, at this day, I find rather an uneasy one. Connected 
with this sleep was a little incident which served, as hundreds 
of others did at that time, to convince me how easily a man, 
who has never been in any great distress, may pass through 
life without knowing, in his own person, at least, anything 
of the possible goodness pf the human heart, or, as I must add 
with a sigh, of its possible vileness. So thick a curtain of 
manners is drawn over the features and expressions of men's 
natures, that, to the ordinary observer, the two extremities, 
and the infinite field of varieties which lie between them, are 
all confounded, — the vast an^ multitudinous compass of their 
several harmonies reduced to the meagre outline of differences 
expressed in the gamut or alphabet of elementary sounds. 
The case was this: for the first four or five miles from Lon- 
don, I annoyed my fellow-passenger on the roof, by occa- 
sionally falling against him when the coach gave a lurch to 
his side; and, indeed, if the road had been less smooth and 
level than it is, I should have fallen oiif from weakness. Of 
this annoyance he complained heavily, as, perhaps, in the 
same circumstances, most people would. He expressed his 
complaint, however, more morosely than the occasion seemed 
to warrant; and if I had parted with him at that moment, I 
should have thought of him (if I had considered it worth 
while to think of him at all) as a surly and almost brutal fel- 
low. However, I was conscious that I had given him some 
cause for complaint, and, therefore, I apologized to him, and 
assured him I would do what I could to avoid falling asleep 
for the future, and at the same time, in as few words as pos- 



24 DE QUINCEY 

sible, I explained to him that I was ill, and in a weak state 
from long suffering, and that I could not afford, at that time, 
to take an inside place. The man's manner changed, upon 
hearing this explanation, in an instant; and when I next 
woke for a minute, from the noise and lights of Hounslow 
(for, in spite of my wishes and efforts, I had fallen asleep 
again within two minutes from the time I had spoken to him), 
I found that he had put his arm round me to protect me from 
falling off; and for the rest of my journey he behaved to me 
with the gentleness of a woman, so that, at length, I almost 
lay in his arms; and this was the more kind, as he could not 
have known that I was not going the whole way to Bath or 
Bristol. Unfortunately, indeed, I did go rather further than 
I intended; for so genial and refreshing was my sleep, that the 
next time, after leaving Hounslow, that I fully awoke, was 
upon the sudden pulling up of the mail (possibly at a post- 
olftce), and, on inquiry, I found that we had reached Maiden- 
head, six or seven miles, I think, ahead of SaU Hill. Here I 
alighted; and for the half-minute that the mail stopped, I was 
entreated by my friendly companion (who, from the transient 
glimpse I had of him in Piccadilly, seemed to me to be a 
gentleman's butler, or person of that rank), to go to bed 
without delay. This I promised, though with no intention of 
doing so; and, in fact, I immediately set forward, or, rather, 
backward, on foot. It must then have been nearly midnight; 
but so slowly did I creep along that I heard a clock in a cot- 
tage strike four before I turned down the lane from Slough 
to Eton. The air and the sleep had both refreshed me; but 
I was weary, nevertheless. I remember a thought (obvious 
enough, and which has been prettily expressed by a Roman 
poet) which gave me some consolation, at that moment, under 
my poverty. There had been, some time before, a murder 
comrnitted on or near Hounslow Heath.' I think I cannot 
be mistaken when I say that the name of the murdered person 
was Steele, and that he was the owner of a lavender plantation 
in that neighborhood. Every step of my progress was bring- 
ing me nearer to the heath; and it naturally occurred to me 
that I and the accursed murderer, if he were that night 
abroad, might, at every instant, be unconsciously approaching 
each other through the darkness; in which case, said I, sup- 
posing I — instead of being as indeed I am, little better than 
an outcast, 

" Lord of my learning, and no land beside — " 

were, like my friend Lord ,' heir, by general repute, to 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER 25 

£70,000 per annum, what a panic should I be under, at this 
moment, about my throat! Indeed, it was not Hkely that 

Lord . should ever be in my situation ; but, nevertheless, 

the spirit of the remark remains true, that vast power and 
possessions make a man shamefully afraid of dying; and I 
am convinced that many of the most intrepid adventurers, 
who, by fortunately being poor, enjoy the full use of their 
natural courage, would, if, at the very instant of going into 
action, news were brought to them that they had unexpectedly 
succeeded to an estate in England of £50,000 a year, feel 
their disHke to bullets considerably sharpened,^" and their 
efforts at perfect equanimity and self-possession proportion- 
ately difhcult. So true it is, in the language of a wise man, 
whose own experience had made him acquainted with both 
fortunes, that riches are better fitted 

*' To slacken virtue, and abate her edge. 
Than tempt her to do aught may merit praise."* 

I dally with my subject, because, to myself, the remembrance 
of these times is profoundly interesting. But my reader shall 
not have any further cause to complain ; for I now hasten to its 
close. In the road between Slough and Eton I fell asleep; 
and, just as the morning began to dawn, I was awakened by 
the voice of a man standing over me and surveying me. I 
know not what he was. He was an ill-looking fellow, but not, 
therefore, of necessity, an ill-meaning fellow; or, if he were, I 
suppose he thought that no person sleeping out-of-doors in 
winter could be worth robbing. In which conclusion, how- 
ever, as it regarded myself, 1 beg to assure him, if he should 
be among my readers, that he was mistaken. After a slight 
remark, he passed on. I was not sorry at his disturbance, as it 
enabled me to pass through Eton before people were generally 
up. The night had been heavy and lowering, but towards the 
morning it had changed to a slight frost, and the ground and 
the trees were now covered with rime. I slipped through 
Eton unobserved; washed myself, and as far as possible, 
adjusted my dress, at a little public house in Windsor; and, 
about eight o'clock, went down towards Pote's. On my road 
I met some junior boys of whom I made inquiries. An 
Etonian is always a gentleman, and, in spite of my shabby 

habiliments, they answered me civilly. My friend, Lord , 

was gone to the University of . '' Ibi omnis efTusus 

labor! " I had, however, other friends at Eton; but it is not to 
*Paradise Regained 



26 DE QUINCEY 

all who wear that name in prosperity that a man is willing to 
present himself in distress. On recollecting myself, however, 

I asked for the Earl of D /' to whom (though my 

acquaintance with him was not so intimate as with some 
Others) I should not have shrunk from presenting myself under 
any circumstances. He was still at Eton, though, I believe, 
on the wing for Cambridge. I called, was received kindly, 
and asked to breakfast. 

Here let me stop for a moment, to check my reader from any 
erroneous conclusions. Because I have had occasion incident- 
ally to speak of various patrician friends, it must not be sup- 
posed that I have myself any pretensions to rank or high blood. 
I thank God that I have not. I am the son of a plain English 
merchant, esteemed, during his life, for his great integrity, and 
strongly attached to literary pursuits (indeed, he was himself, 
anonymously, an author). If he had lived, it was expected 
that he would have been very rich; but, dying prematurely, he 
left no more than about £30,000 amongst seven different claim- 
ants. My mother I may mention with honour, as still more 
highly gifted; for, though unpretending to the name and hon- 
ours of a literary woman, I shall presume to call her (what 
many literary women are not) an intellectual woman; and I 
believe that if ever her letters should be collected and published, 
they would be thought generally to exhibit as much strong 
and masculine sense, delivered in as pure " mother English," 
racy and fresh with idiomatic graces, as any in our language, — 
hardly excepting those of Lady Mary V/ortley Montagu. 
These are my honours of descent; I have no others; and I have 
thanked God sincerely that I have not, because, in my judg- 
ment, a station which raises a man too eminently above the 
level of his fellow-creatures, is not the most favourable to moral 
or to intellectual qualities. 

Lord D placed me before a most magnificent break- 
fast. It was really so; but in my eyes it seemed trebly mag- 
nificent, from being the first regular meal, the first " good 
man's table," that I had sat down to for months. Strange to 
say, however, I could scarcely eat anything. On the day when 
I first received my ten-pound bank-note, I had gone to a 
baker's shop and bought a cpuple of rolls; this very shop I 
had two months or six weeks before surveyed with an eager- 
ness of desire which it was almost humiliating to me to recol- 
lect. I remembered the story about Otway; and feared that 
there might be danger in eating too rapidly. But I had no 
need for alarm; my appetite was quite sunk, and I became sick 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 27 

before I had eaten half of what I had bought. This efifect, 
from eating what approached to a meal, I continued to feel for 
weeks; or, , when I did not experience any nausea, part of what 
I ate was rejected, sometimes with acidity, sometimes immedi- 
ately and without any acidity. On the present occasion, at 

Lord D 's table, I found myself not at all better than usual; 

and, in the midst of luxuries, I had no appetite. I had, how- 
ever, unfortunately, at all times a craving for wine; I 

explained my situation, therefore, to Lord D , and gave 

him a short account of my late sufferings, at which he expressed 
great compassion, and called for wine. This gave me a 
momentary relief and pleasure; and on all occasions, when I 
had an opportunity, I never failed to drink wine, which I wor- 
shipped then as I have since worshipped opium. I am con- 
vinced, however, that this indulgence in wine continued to 
strengthen my malady, for the tone of my stomach was appar- 
ently quite sunk; but, by a better regimen, it might sooner, 
and, perhaps, effectually, have been revived. I hope that it 
was not from this love of wine that I lingered in the neigh- 
borhood of my Eton friends; I persuaded myself then that it 

was from reluctance to ask of Lord D , on whom I was 

conscious I had not sufficient claims, the particular service in 
quest of which I had come to Eton. I was, however, unwilling 

to lose my journey, and, — I asked it. Lord D , whose 

good nature was unbounded, and which, in regard to myself, 
had been measured rather by his compassion perhaps for my 
condition, and his knowledge of my intimacy with some of his 
relatives, than by an over-rigourous inquiry into the extent of 
my own direct claims, faltered, nevertheless, at this request. 
He acknowledged that he did not like to have any dealings with 
money-lenders, and feared lest such a transaction might come 
to the ears of his connections. Moreover, he doubted whether 
his signature, whose expectations were so much more bounded 

than those of , would avail with my unchristian friends. 

However, he did not wish, as it seemed, to mortify me by an 
absolute refusal; for, after a little consideration, he promised, 
under certain conditions, which he pointed out, to give his 

security. Lord D was at this time not eighteen years of 

age ; but I have often doubted, on recollecting, since, the good 
sense and prudence which on this occasion he mingled with 
so much urbanity of manner (an urbanity which in him wore 
the grace of youthful sincerity), whether any statesman — the 
oldest and the most accompHshed in diplomacy — could have 
acquitted himself better under the same circumstances. Most 



28 DE QUINCEY 

people, indeed, cannot be addressed on such a business, without 
surveying you with looks as austere and unpropitious as those 
of a Saracen's head. 

Recomforted by this promise, which was not quite equal to 
the best, but far above the worst, that I had pictured to myself 
as possible, I returned in a Windsor coach to London three 
days after I had quitted it. And now I come to the end of my 

story. The Jews did not approve of Lord D 's terms; 

whether they would in the end have acceded to them, and were 
only seeking time for making due inquiries, I know not; but 
many delays were made, — time passed on, — the small frag- 
ment of my bank-note had just melted away, and before any 
conclusion could have been put to the business, I must have 
relapsed into my former state of wretchedness. Suddenly, 
however, at this crisis, an opening was made, almost by acci- 
dent, for reconciliation with my friends. I quitted London in 
haste, for a remote part of England; after some time, I pro- 
ceeded to the university; and it was not until many months 
had passed away, that I had it in my power again to revisit 
the ground which had become so interesting to me, and to this 
day remains so, as the chief scene of my youthful sufferings. 

Meantime, what had become of poor Ann? For her I have 
reserved my concluding words; according to our agreement, 
I sought her daily, and waited for her every night, so long as 
I stayed in London, at the corner of Titchfield-street. I 
inquired for her of every one who was likely to know her; and 
during the last hours of my stay in London, I put into activity 
every means of tracing her that my knowledge of London 
suggested, and the limited extent of my power made possible. 
The street where she had lodged I knew, but not the house; 
and I remembered, at last, some account which she had given 
of ill treatment from her landlord, which made it probable that 
she had quitted those lodgings before we parted. She had 
few acquaintances; most people, besides, thought that the 
earnestness of my inquiries arose from motives which moved 
their laughter or their slight regard; and others, thinking that 
I was in chase of a girl who had robbed me of some trifles, 
were naturally and excusably indisposed to give me any clue to 
her, if, indeed, they had any to give. Finally, as my despairing 
resource, on the day I left London, I put into the hands of the 
only person who (I was sure) must know Ann by sight, from 
having been in company with us once or twice, an address to 

in shire, at that time the residence of my family. 

But, to this hour, I have never heard a syllable about her. 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 29 

This, amongst such troubles as most men meet with in this 
life, has been my heaviest affliction. If she had lived, doubt- 
less we must have been sometimes in search of each other, at 
the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of Lon- 
don; perhaps even within a few feet of each other, — a barrier 
no wider, in a London street, often amounting in the end to a 
separation for eternity! During some years, 1 hoped that she 
did live ; and I suppose that, in the literal and unrhetorical use 
of the word myriad,! may say, that on my different visits to Lon- 
don, I have looked into many, many myriads of female faces, 
in the hope of meeting her. I should know her again amongst 
a thousand, if I saw her for a moment; for, though not hand- 
some, she had a sweet expression of countenance, and a 
peculiar and graceful carriage of the head. I sought her, I 
have said, in hope. So it was for years ; but now I should fear 
to see her; and her cough, which grieved me when I parted 
with her, is now my consolation. I now wish to see her no 
longer, but think of her, more gladly, as one long since laid in 
the grave; — in the grave, I would hope, of a Magdalen; — 
taken away, before injuries and cruelty had blotted out and 
transfigured her ingenuous nature, or the brutalifies of ruf- 
fians had completed the ruin they had begun. 

So then, Oxford-street,' stony-hearted stepmother, thou that 
Hstenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of chil- 
dren, at length I was dismissed from thee! — the time was 
come, at last, that I no more should pace in anguish thy never- 
ending terraces ; no more should dream, and wake in captivity 
to the pangs of hunger. Successors, too many to myself and 
Ann, have, doubtless, since then trodden in our footsteps, 
inheritors of our calamities, other orphans than Ann have 
sighed, tears have been shed by other children; and thou, 
Oxford-street, hast since echoed to the groans of innumerable 
hearts. For myself, however, the storm which I had outlived 
seemed to have been the pledge of a long fair weather; the pre- 
mature sufferings which I had paid down, to have been 
accepted as a ransom for many years to come, as a price of 
long immunity from sorrow; and if again I walked in London, 
a solitary and contemplative man (as oftentimes I did), I 
walked for the most part in serenity and peace of mind. And, 
although it is true that the calamities, of my novitiate in Lon- 
don, had struck root so deeply in my bodily constitution that 
afterward they shot up and flourished afresh, and grew into a 
noxious umbrage that has overshadowed and darkened my 
latter years, yet these second assaults of suffering were met 



30 DE QUINCEY 

with a fortitude more confirmed, with the resources of a 
maturer intellect, and with alleviations from sympathizing 
affection, how deep and tender! 

Thus, however, with whatsoever alleviations, years that were 
far asunder were bound together by subtle links of sufferings 
derived from a common root. And herein I notice an instance 
of the short-sightedness of human desires, — that oftentimes, on 
moonlight nights during my first mournful abode in London, 
my consolation was (if such it could be thought) to gaze from 
Oxford-street up every avenue in succession which pierces 
through the heart of Mary-le-bone to the fields and the woods; 
for that; said I, travelling with my eyes up the long vistas which 
lay part in* light' and part in shade, "that is the road to the 

north, and, therefore, to , and if I had the wings of a dove, 

that way I would fly for comfort." Thus I said, and thus I 
wished in my blindness ; yet, even in that very northern region 
it was, in that very valley, nay, in that very house to which my 
erroneous wishes pointed, that this second birth of my suffer- 
ings began, and that they again threatened to besiege the 
citadel of Hfe and hope. There it was that for years I was per- 
secuted by visions as ugly, and as ghastly phantoms, as ever 
haunted the couch of an Orestes; and in this unhappier than 
he, — that sleep, which comes to all as a respite and a restora- 
tion, and to him especially as a blessed balm for his wounded 
heart and his haunted brain, visited me as my bitterest scourge. 
Thus blind was I in my desires; yet, if a veil interposes between 
the dim-sightedness of man and his future calamities, the same 
vale hides from him their alleviations; and a grief which had 
not been feared is met by consolations which had not been 
hoped. I, therefore, who participated, as it were, in the troubles 
of Orestes (excepting only in his agitated conscience), partici- 
pated no less in all his supports; my Eumenides, like his, were 
at my bed-feet, and stared in upon me through the curtains; 
but, watching by my pillow, or defrauding herself of sleep to 
bear me company through the heavy watches of the night, sat 
my Electra; for thou, beloved M., dear companion of my later 
years, thou wast my Electra! and neither in nobility of mind 
nor in long-suffering affection wouldst permit that a Grecian 
sister should excel an English wife. For thou thoughtest not 
much to stoop to humble offices of kindness, and to servile min- 
istrations of tenderest affection; to wipe away for years the 
unwholesome dews upon the forehead, or to refresh the lips 
when parched and baked with fever, nor even when thy own 
peaceful slumbers had by long sympathy become infected with 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 31 

the spectacle of my dread contest with phantoms and shadowy 
enemies, that oftentimes bade me " sleep no more! " — not even 
then didst thou utter a complaint or any murmur, nor with- 
draw thy angelic smiles, nor shrink from thy service of love, 
more than Electra did of old. For she, too, though she was 
a Grecian woman, and the daughter of the king^"" of men, yet 
wept sometimes, and hid her face^^ in her robe. 

But these troubles are past, and thou wilt read these records 
of a period so dolorous to us both as the legend of some 
hideous dream that can return no more. Meantime I am again 
in London; and again I pace the terraces of Oxford-street by 
night; and oftentimes, — when I am oppressed by anxieties that 
demand all my philosophy and the comfort of thy presence to 
support, and yet remember that I am separated from thee by 
three hundred miles, and the length of three dreary months, — 
I look up the streets that run northward from Oxford-street, 
upon moonlight nights, and recollect my youthful ejaculation 
of anguish; and remembering that thou art sitting alone in 
that same valley, and mistress of that very house to which my 
heart turned in its blindness nineteen years ago, I think that, 
though blind indeed, and scattered to the winds of late, the 
promptings of my heart may yet have had reference to a 
remoter time, and may be 'justified if read in another meaning; 
and if I could allow myself to descend again to the impotent 
wishes of childhood, I should again say to myself, as I look to 
the: north, " O that I had the wings of a dove! " and with how 
just a confidence in thy good and gracious nature might I add 
the other half of my early ejaculation, — " And that way I would 
fly for comfort! " 

Notes 

*A third exception might perhaps have been added; and my reason 
for not adding that exception is chiefly because it was only in his 
juvenile efforts that the writer to whom I allude expressly addressed 
himself to philosophical themes; his riper powers have been dedicated 
(on very excusable and very intelligible grounds, under the present 
direction of the popular mind in England) to criticism and the fine 
arts. This reason apart, however. I doubt whether he is not rather 
to be considered an acute thinker than a subtle one. It is, besides, a 
great drawback on his mastery over philosophical subjects, that he has 
obviously not had the advantage of a regular scholastic education; he 
has not read Plato in his youth (which most likely was only his mis- 
fortune), but neither has he read Kant in his manhood (which is his 
fault). 

"At this period (autumn of 1856), when thirty-five years have elapsed 
since the first publication of these memoirs, reasons of delicacy can no 
longer claim respect for concealing the Jew's name, or at least the 
name which he adopted in his dealings with the Gentiles. I say, there- 



32 DE QUINCEV 

fore, without scruple, that the name was Dell; and some years later it 
was one ot the names that came before the House of Commons in 
connection with something or other (I have long since forgotten 
what) growing out of the parliamentary movement against the Duke 
of York, in reference to Mrs. Clark. Like all the other Jews with 
whom I have had negotiations, he was frank and honorable in his 
mode of conducting business. What he promised, he performed; and 
if his terms were high, as naturally they could not but be, to cover his 
risks, he avowed them from the first. 

'To this same Jew, by the way, some eighteen months afterwards, 
I applied again on the same business; and, dating at that time from a 
respectable college, I was fortunate enough to gain his serious atten- 
tion to my proposals. My necessities had not arisen from any extrava- 
gance, or youthful levities (these, my habits and the nature of my 
pleasures raised me far above), but simply from the vindictive malice 
of my guardian, who, when he found himself no longer able to pre- 
vent me from going to the university, had, as a parting token of his 
good nature, refused to sign an order for granting me a shilling 
beyond the allowance made to me at school, namely, one hundred 
pounds per annum. Upon this sum, it was, in my time, barely possible 
to have lived in college; and not possible to a man, who, though above 
the paltry alTectation of ostentatious disregard for money, and with- 
out any expensive tastes, confided, nevertheless, rather too much in 
servants, and did not delight in the petty details of minute economy. 
I soon, therefore, became embarrassed; and, at' length, after a most 
voluminous negotiation with the Jew (some parts of which, if I had 
leisure to rehearse them, would greatly amuse my readers), I was put 
in possession of the sum I asked for, on the " regular " terms of pay- 
ing the Jew seventeen and a half per cent, by way of annuity on all the 
money furnished; Israel, on his part, graciously resuming no more 
than about ninety guineas of the said money, on account of an attor- 
ney's bill (for what services, to whom rendered, and when, — whether 
at the siege of Jerusalem, at the building of the Second Temple, or on 
some earlier occasion, — I have not yet been able to discover). How 
many perches this bill measured I really forget; but I still keep it in a 
cabinet of natural curiosities, and some time or other I believe I shall 
present it to the British Museum. 

* Earl of Altamont. 

^ Marquis of Sligo. 

' Mayo and Sligo. 

' The Bristol Mail is the best appointed in the kingdom, owing to the 
double advantage of an unusually good road, and of an extra sum for 
expenses subscribed by the Bristol merchants. 

® Two men, Holloway and Haggerty, were long afterward convicted, 
upon very questionable evidence, as the perpetrators of this murder. 
The main testimony against them was that of a Newgate turnkey, who 
had imperfectly overheard a conversation between the two men. The 
current impression was that of great dissatisfaction with the evidence; 
and this impression was strengthened by the pamphlet of an acute 
lawyer, exposing the unsoundness and incoherency of the statements 
relied upon by the court. They were executed, however, in the teeth 
of all opposition. And as it happened that an enormous wreck of life 
occurred at the execution (no fewer, I believe, than sixty persons 
having been trampled under foot by the unusual pressure of some 
brewers' draymen forcing their way with linked arms to the space 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 33 

below the drop), this tragedy was regarded for many years by a section 
of the London mob as a providential judgment upon the passive 
metropolis. 

* Lord Altamont. 

" It will be objected that many men, of the highest rank and wealth, 
have, in our own day, as well as throughout our history, been amongst 
the foremost in courti;ig danger in battle. True, but this is not the 
case supposed. Long familiarity with power has, to them, deadened 
its effect and its attractions. 

"Lord Desert. 

" Agamemnon. 

" Ofifxa Sstg sig itSTtXov. The scholar will know that throughout 
this passage I refer to the early scenes of the Orestes, — one of the most 
beautiful exhibitions of the domestic affections which even the dramas 
of Euripides can furnish. To the English reader, it may be necessary 
to say, that the situation at the opening of the drama is that of a 
brother attended only by his sister during the demoniacal possession of 
a suffering conscience (or, in the mythology of the play, haunted by 
the Furies), and in circumstances of immediate danger from enemies, 
and of desertion or cold regard from nominal friends. 

3 



n 



THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 



IT is SO long- since I first took opium, that if it had been a 
trifling incident in my Hfe, I might have forgotten its 
date; but cardinal events are not to be forgotten; and, 
from circumstances connected with it, I remember that 
it must be referred to the autumn of 1804. During that 
season I was in London, having come thither for the first 
time since my entrance at college. And my introduction 
to opium arose in the following way: From an early age 
I had been accustomed to wash my head in cold water 
at least once a day; being suddenly seized with tooth-ache, 
I attributed it to some relaxation caused by an accidental 
intermission of that practice; jumped out of bed, plunged 
my head into a basin of cold water, and, with hair thus 
wetted, went to sleep. The next morning, as I need hardly 
say, I awoke with excruciating rheumatic pains of the head 
and face, from which I had hardly any respite for about 
twenty days. On the twenty-first day I think it was, and on a 
Sunday, that I went out into the streets; rather to run away, 
if possible, from my torments, than with any distinct purpose. 
By accident, I met a college acquaintance, who recommended 
opium. Opium! dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and 
pain! I had heard of it as I had heard of manna or of ambrosia, 
but no further; how unmeaning a sound was it at that time! 
what solemn chords does it now strike upon my heart! what 
heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remembrances! 
Reverting for a moment to these, I feel a mystic importance 
attached to the minutest circumstances connected with the 
place, and the time, and the man (if man he was), that first laid 
open to me the paradise of opium-eaters. It was a Sunday 
afternoon, wet and cheerless ; and a duller spectacle this earth 
of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London. My 
road homewards lay through Oxford-street ; and near " the 
stately Pantheon" (as Mr. Wordsworth has obligingly called 
it) I saw a druggist's shop. The druggist (unconscious minis- 
ter of celestial pleasures!), as if in sympathy with the rainy 

34 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 35 

Sunday, looked dull and stupid, just as any mortal druggist 
might be expected to look on a Sunday; and when I asked 
for the tincture of opium, he gave it to me as any other man 
might do ; and, furthermore, out of my shilling returned to me 
what seemed to be a real copper half-penny, taken out of a 
real wooden drawer. Nevertheless, in spite of such indications 
of humanity, he has ever since existed in my mind as a beatific 
vision of an immortal druggist, sent down to earth on a special 
mission to myself. And it confirms me in this way of con- 
sidering him, that when I next came up to London, I sought 
him near the stately Pantheon, and found him not, and thus 
to me, who knew not his name (if, indeed, he had one), he 
seemed rather to have vanished from Oxford-street than to 
have removed in any bodily fashion. The reader may choose 
to think of him as possibly, no more than a sublunary drug- 
gist: it may be so, but my faith is better: I believe him to have 
evanesced,' or evaporated. So unwilHngly would I connect 
any mortal remembrances with that hour, and place, and crea- 
ture, that first brought me acquainted with the celestial drug. 

Arrived at my lodgings, it may be supposed that I lost not a 
moment in taking the quantity prescribed. I was necessarily 
ignorant of the whole art and mystery of opium-taking; and 
what I took, I took under every disadvantage. But I took it; 
and in an hour, — oh heavens! what a revulsion! what an 
upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit ! what an 
apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had van- 
ished was now a trifle in my eyes; this negative effect was 
swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which 
had opened before me, in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus 
suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea, a faoixaxo^ ve7rev6>£<r, 
for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness, about 
which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once dis- 
covered ; happiness might now be bought for a penny, and car- 
ried in the waistcoat-pocket; portable ecstasies might be had 
corked up in a pint-bottle; and peace cf mind could be sent 
down in gallons by the mail-coach. But, if I talk in this way, 
the reader will think I am laughing; and I can assure him 
that nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its 
pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion; and, in 
his happiest state, the opium-eater cannot present himself in the 
character of '' L' Allegro "; even then, he speaks and thinks as 
becomes " II Penseroso ". Nevertheless, I have a very repre- 
hensible way of jesting, at times, in the midst of my own mis- 
ery; and, unless when I am checked by some more powerful 



36 DE QUINCE Y 

feelings, I am afraid I shall be guilty of this indecent practice 
even in these annals of suffering or enjoyment. The reader 
must allow a little to my infirm nature in this respect; and, 
with a few indulgences of that sort, I shall endeavor to be as 
grave, if not drowsy, as fits a theme like opium, so anti- 
mercurial as it really is, and so drowsy as it is falsely reputed. 

And, first, one word with respect to its bodily effects; for 
upon all that has been hitherto written on the subject of opium, 
whether by travellers in Turkey (who may plead their privilege 
of lying as an old immemorial right) or by professors of medi- 
cine, writing ex cathedra, I have but one emphatic criticism 
to pronounce, — Lies! lies! lies! I remember once, in passing 
a book-stall, to have caught these words from a page of some 
satiric author: ^' By this time I became convinced that the Lon- 
don newspapers spoke truth at least twice a week, namely, on 
Tuesday and Saturday, and might safely be depended upon 
for — the list of bankrupts." In like manner, I do by no means 
deny that some truths have been delivered to the world in 
regard to opium; thus, it has been repeatedly affirmed, by the 
learned, that opium is a dusky brown in color, — and this, take 
notice, I grant; secondly, that it is rather dear, which also I 
grant, — for, in my time, East India opium has been three 
guineas a pound, and Turkey, eight; and, thirdly, that if you 
eat a good deal of it, most probably you must do what is par- 
ticularly disagreeable to any man of regular habits, namely, — 
die.^ These weighty propositions are, all and singular, true ; I 
cannot gainsay them; and truth ever was, and will be, com- 
mendable. But, in these three theorems, I believe we have 
exhausted the stock of knowledge as yet accumulated by man 
on the subject of opium. And, therefore, worthy doctors, as 
there seems to be room for further discoveries, stand aside, 
and allow me to come forward and lecture on this matter. 

First, then, it is not so much affirmed as taken for granted, 
by all who ever mention opium, formally or incidentally, that 
it does or can produce intoxication. Now, reader, assure 
yourself, meo periculo, that no quantity of opium ever did, or 
could, intoxicate. As to the tincture of opium (commonly 
called laudanum), that might certainly intoxicate, if a man 
could bear to take enough of it; but why? because it contains 
so much proof spirit, and not because it contains so much 
opium. But crude opium, I affirm peremptorily, is incapable of 
producing any state of body at all resembling that which is 
produced by alcohol; and not in degree only incapable, but 
even in kind; it is not in the quantity of its effects merely, but 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 37 

in the quality, that it differs altogether. The pleasure given 
by wine is always mounting, and tending to a crisis, after which 
it decHnes;'that from opium, when once generated, is stationary 
for eight or ten hours : the first, to borrow a technical distinc- 
tion from medicine, is a case of acute, the second of chronic, 
pleasure; the one is a flame, the other a steady and equable 
glow. But the main distinction Hes in this, that whereas wine 
disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken 
in a proper manner), introduces amongst them the most 
exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man 
of his self-possession; opium greatly invigorates it. Wine 
unsettles and clouds the judgment, and gives a preternatural 
brightness, and a vivid exaltation, to the contempts and the 
admirations, to the loves and the hatreds, of the drinker; opium, 
on the contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to all 
the faculties, active or passive; and, with respect to the temper 
and moral feelings in general, it gives simply that sort of vital 
warmth which is approved by the judgment, and which would 
probably always accompany a bodily constitution of primeval 
or antediluvian health. Thus, for instance, opium, Hke wine, 
gives an expansion to the heart and the benevolent affections, 
but, then, with this remarkable difference, that in the sudden 
development of kind-heartedness which accompanies inebria- 
tion, there is always more or less of a maudlin character which 
exposes it to the contempt of the bystander. Men shake hands, 
swear eternal friendship, and shed tears, — no mortal knows 
why; and the sensual creature is clearly uppermost. But the 
expansion of the benigner feelings, incident to opium, is no 
febrile access, but a healthy restoration to that state which the 
mind would naturally recover upon the removal of any deep- 
seated irritation of pain that had disturbed and quarrelled with 
the impulses of a heart originally just and good. True it is, 
that even wine, up to a certain point, and with certain men, 
rather tends to exalt and to steady the intellect; I myself, who 
have never been a great wine-drinker, used to find that half 
a dozen glasses of wine advantageously affected the faculties, 
brightened and intensified the consciousness, and gave to the 
mind a feehng of being " ponderibus Hbrata suis;" and cer- 
tainly it is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any 
man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most 
men are disguised by sobriety; and it is when they are drink- 
ing (as some old gentleman says in Athenaeus) that men dis- 
play themselves in their true complexion of character; which 
surely is not disguising themselves. But still, wine constantly 



38 DE QUINCEY 

leads a man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance; and, 
beyond a certain point, it is sure to volatilize and to disperse 
the intellectual energies; whereas opium always seems to com- 
pose what had been agitated, and to concentrate what had 
been distracted. In short, to sum up all in one word, a man 
who is inebriated, or tending to inebriation, is, and feels that 
he is, in a condition which calls up into supremacy the merely 
human too often the brutal, part of his nature; but the opium- 
eater (I speak of him who is not sufifering from any disease, or 
other remote effects of opium) feels that the diviner part of his 
nature is paramount; that is, the moral afifections are in a state 
of cloudless serenity; and over all is the great light of the 
majestic intellect. 

This is the doctrine of the true church on the subject of 
opium: of which church I acknowledge myself to be the only 
member, — the alpha and omega; but then it is to be recollected 
that I speak from the ground of a large and profound personal 
experience, whereas most of the unscientific^ authors who have 
at all treated of opium, and even of those who have written 
expressly on the materia medica, make it evident, from the hor- 
ror they express of it, that their experimental knowledge of its 
action is none at all. I will, however, candidly acknowledge 
that I have met with one person who bore evidence to its 
intoxicating power, such as staggered my own incredulity ; for 
he was a surgeon, and had himself taken opium largely.* I 
happened to say to him, that his enemies (as I had heard) 
charged him with talking nonsense on politics, and that his 
friends apologized for him by suggesting that he was con- 
stantly in a state of intoxication from opium. Now, the accu- 
sation, said I, is not prima facie, and of necessity, an absurd 
one; but the defence is. To my surprise, however, he insisted 
that both his enemies and his friends were in the right. ** I will 
maintain," said he, "that I do talk nonsense; and secondly, I 
will maintain that I do not talk nonsense upon principle, or 
with any view to profit, but solely and simply," said he, " solely 
and simply, — solely and simply (repeating it three times over), 
because I am drunk with opium; and that daily." I replied, 
that as to the allegation of his enemies, as it seemed to be estab- 
lished upon such respectable testimony, seeing that the three 
parties concerned all agreed in it, it did not become me to 
question it ; but the defence set up I must demur to. He pro- 
ceeded to discuss the matter, and to lay down his rea- 
sons; but it seemed to me so impolite to pursue an argu- 
ment which must have presumed a man mistaken on a point 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 39 

belonging- to his own profession, that I did not press him even 
when his course of argument seemed open to objection; not to 
mention th^t a man who talks nonsense, even though " with no 
view to profit," is not altogether the most agreeable partner in 
a dispute, whether as opponent or respondent. I confess, how- 
ever, that the authority of a surgeon, and one who was reputed 
a good one, may seem a weighty one to my prejudice; but still 
I must plead my experience, which was greater than his 
greatest by seven thousand drops a day ; and though it was not 
possible to suppose a medical man unacquainted with the char- 
acteristic symptoms of vinous intoxication, yet it struck me 
that he might proceed on a logical error of using the word 
intoxication with too great latitude, and extending it generic- 
ally to all modes of nervous excitement, instead of restricting it 
as the expression of a specific sort of excitement, connected 
with certain diagnostics. Some people have maintained, in my 
hearing, that they had been drunk upon green tea; and a 
medical student in London, for whose knowledge in his pro- 
fession I have reason to feel great respect, assured me, the 
other day, that a patient, in recovering from an illness, had got 
drunk on a beef-steak. 

Having dwelt so muclj on this first and leading error in 
respect to opium, I shall notice very briefly a second and a 
third; which are, that the elevation of spirits produced by 
opium is necessarily followed by a proportionate depression, 
and that the natural and even immediate consequence of opium 
is torpor and stagnation, animal and mental. The first of 
these errors I shall content myself with simply denying; assur- 
ing my reader, that for ten years, during which I took opium 
at intervals, the day succeeding to that on which I allowed 
myself this luxury was always a day of unusually good spirits. 

With respect to the torpor supposed to follow, or rather (if 
we were to credit the numerous pictures of Turkish opium- 
eaters) to accompany, the practice of opium-eating, I deny 
that also. Certainly, opium is classed under the head of nar- 
cotics, and some such effect it may produce in the end; but the 
primary effects of opium are always, and in the highest degree, 
to excite and stimulate the system : this first stage of its action 
always lasted with me, during my novitiate, for upwards of 
eight hours; so that it must be the fault of the opium-eater 
himself, if he does not so time his exhibition of the dose (to 
speak medically) as that the whole weight of its narcotic 
influence may descend upon his sleep. Turkish opium-eaters, 
it seems, are absurd enough to sit, like so many equestrian 



40 DE QUINCEY 

Statues, on logs of wood as stupid as themselves. But, that the 
reader may judge of the degree in which opium is likely to 
stupefy the faculties of an Englishman, I shall (by way of treat- 
ing the question illustratively, rather than argumentatively) 
describe the way in which I myself often passed an opium even- 
ing in London, during the period between 1804 and 1812. It 
will be seen, that at least opium did not move me to seek soli- 
tude, and much less to seek inactivity, or the torpid state of 
self-involution ascribed to the Turks. I give this account at 
the risk of being pronounced a crazy enthusiast or visionary; 
but I regard that little. I must desire my reader to bear in 
mind, that I was a hard student, and at severe studies for all 
the rest of my time, and certainly I had a right occasionally 
to relaxations as well as other people : these, however, I allowed 
myself but seldom. 

The late Duke of ^ used to say, " Next Friday, by the 

blessing of Heaven, I purpose to be drunk;" and in Hke man- 
ner I used to fix beforehand how often, within a given time, 
and when, I would commit a debauch of opium. This was sel- 
dom more than once in three weeks ; for at that time I could not 
have ventured to call every day (as I did afterwards) for "a 
glass of laudanum negus, warm, and without sugar." No ; as I 
have said, I seldom drank laudanum, at that time more than 
once in three weeks : this was usually on a Tuesday or a Satur- 
day night; my reason for which was this. In those days, 
Grassini" sang at the opera, and her voice was delightful to me 
beyond all that I had ever heard. I know not what may be the 
state of the opera-house now, having never been within its 
walls for seven or eight years ; but at that time it was by much 
the most pleasant place of resort in London for passing an 
evening. Five shillings admitted one to the gallery, which was 
subject to far less annoyance than the pit of the theatres; the 
orchestra was distinguished, by its sweet and melodious gran- 
deur, from all English orchestras, the composition of which, I 
confess, is not acceptable to my ear, from the predominance of 
the clangorous instruments, and the almost absolute tyranny of 
the violin. The choruses were divine to hear; and when Gras- 
sini appeared in some interlude, as she often did, and poured 
forth her passionate soul as Andromache, at the tomb of Hec- 
tor, etc., I question whether any Turk, of all that ever entered 
the paradise of opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I 
had. But, indeed, I honor the barbarians too much by sup- 
posing them capable of any pleasures approaching to the intel- 
lectual ones of an Englishman. For music is an intellectual or 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 41 

a sensual pleasure, according to the temperament of him who 
hears it. And, by the by, with the exception of the fine extrav- 
aganza on that subject in " Twelfth Night," I do not recollect 
more than one thing said adequately on the subject of music 
in all literature ; it is a passage in the " Religio Medici " ^ of Sir 
Thomas Browne, and, though chiefly remarkable for its sublim- 
ity, has also a philosophic value, inasmuch as it points to the 
true theory of musical effects. The mistake of most people is, to 
suppose that it is by the ear they communicate with music, and 
therefore that they are purely passive to its effects. But this 
is not so; it is by the reaction of the mind upon the notices of 
the ear (the matter coming by the senses, the form from the 
mind) that the pleasure is constructed ; and therefore it is that 
people of equally good ear differ so much in this point from one 
another. Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the 
mind, generally increases, of necessity, that particular mode of 
its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw, 
material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure. 
But, says a friend, a succession of musical sounds is to me 
like a collection of Arabic characters : I can attach no ideas to 
them. Ideas! my good sir? there is no occasion for them; all 
that class of ideas which can be available in such a case has a 
language of representative feelings. But this is a subject 
foreign to my present purposes; it is sufficient to say, that a 
chorus, etc., of elaborate harmony, displayed before me, as in 
a piece of arras-work, the whole of my past life, — not as if 
recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated 
in the music; no longer painful to dwell upon, but the detail 
of its incidents removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction, 
and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. All this 
was to be had for five shillings. And over and above the 
music of the stage and the orchestra, I had all around me, in 
the intervals of the performance, the music of the Italian lan- 
guage talked by Italian women, — for the gallery was usually 
crowded with Italians, — and I listened with a pleasure such as 
that with which Weld, the traveller, lay and listened, in Canada, 
to the sweet laughter of Indian women ; for the less you under- 
stand of a language, the more sensible you are to the melody 
or harshness of its sounds. For such a purpose, therefore, it 
was an advantage to me that I was a poor Italian scholar, read- 
ing it but little, and not speaking it at all, not understanding 
a tenth part of what I heard spoken. 

These were my opera pleasures; but another pleasure I had, 
which, as it could be had only on a Saturday night, occasion- 



42 DE QUINCEY 

ally struggled with my love of the opera; for, at that time, Tues- 
day and Saturday were the regular opera nights. On this 
subject I am afraid I shall be rather obscure, but I can assure 
the reader, not at all more so than Marinus in his life of Pro- 
clus, or many other biographers and auto-biographers of fair 
reputation. This pleasure, I have said, was to be had only on 
a Saturday night. What, then, was Saturday night to me, 
more than any other night? I had no labors that I rested 
from ; no wages to receive ; what needed I to care for Saturday 
night, more than as it was a summons to hear Grassini? 
True, most logical reader; what you say is unanswerable. 
And yet so it was and is that whereas dififerent men throw 
their feeHngs into different channels, and most are apt to show 
their interests in the concerns of the poor chiefly by sympathy, 
expressed in some shape or other, with their distresses and sor- 
rows, I, at that time, was disposed to express my interest by 
sympathizing with their pleasures. The pains of poverty I 
had lately seen too much of, — more than I wished to remem- 
ber; but the pleasures of the poor, their consolations of spirit, 
and their reposes from bodily toil, can never become oppres- 
sive to contemplate. Now, Saturday night is the season for 
the chief regular and periodic return of rest to the poor; in 
this point the most hostile sects unite, and acknowledge a 
common link of brotherhood; almost all Christendom rests 
from its labors. It is a rest introductory to another rest; and 
divided by a whole day and two nights from the renewal of 
toil. On this account I feel always, on a Saturday night, as 
though I also were released from some yoke of labor, had some 
wages to receive, and some luxury of repose to enjoy. For 
the sake, therefore, of witnessing, upon as large a scale as pos- 
sible, a spectacle with which my sympathy was so entire, I 
used often, on Saturday nights, after I had taken opium, to 
wander forth, without much regarding the direction or the 
distance, to all the markets, and other parts of London, to 
which the poor resort on a Saturday night for laying out their 
wages. Many a family party, consisting of a man, his wife and 
sometimes one or two of his children, have I listened to, as they 
stood consulting on their ways and means, or the strength of 
their exchequer, or the price of household articles. Gradu- 
ally I became familiar with their wishes, their difficulties, and 
their opinions. Sometimes there might be heard murmurs of 
discontent; but far oftener expressions on the countenance, or 
uttered in words, of patience, hope, and tranquility. And, 
taken generally, I must say, that, in this point, at least, the 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 43 

poor are far more philosophic than the rich; that they show 
a more ready and cheerful submission to what they consider 
as irremediable evils, or irreparable losses. Whenever I saw 
occasion, or could do it without appearing to be intrusive, I 
joined their parties, and gave my opinion upon the matter in 
discussion, which, if not always judicious, was always received 
indulgently. If wages were a little higher, or expected to be 
so, or the quartern loaf a little lower, or it was reported that 
onions and butter were expected to fall, I was glad ; yet, if the 
contrary were true, I drew from opium some means of con- 
soling myself. For opium (like the bee, that extracts its 
materials indiscriminately from roses and from the soof of 
chimneys) can overrule all feehngs into a compHance with the 
master-key. Some of these rambles led me to great distances; 
for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time. 
And sometimes, in my attempts to steer homeward, upon 
nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and 
seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of cir- 
cumnavigating all the capes and head-lands I had doubled in 
my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty prob- 
lems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx's rid- 
dles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, 
bafBe the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of 
hackney coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, 
that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terra 
incognitse, and doubted whether they had yet been laid down in 
the modern charts of London. For all this, however, I paid 
a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannized 
over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London 
came back and haunted my sleep, with the feehng of perplexi- 
ties moral or intellectual, that brought confusion to the reason, 
or anguish and remorse to the conscience. 

Thus I have shown that opium does not, of necessity, pro- 
duce inactivity or torpor ; but that, on the contrary, it often led 
me into markets and theatres. Yet, in candor, I will admit 
that markets and theatres are not the appropriate haunts of the 
opium-eater, when in the divinest state incident to his enjoy- 
ment. In that state, crowds become an oppression to him; 
music, even, too sensual and gross. He naturally seeks soH- 
tude and silence, as indispensable conditions of those trances, 
or profoundest reveries, which are the crown and consum- 
mation of what opium can do for human nature. I, whose 
disease it was to meditate too much and to observe too little, 
and who, upon my first entrance at college, was nearly falling 



44 DE QUINCEY 

into a deep melancholy, from blooding too much on the suf- 
ferings which I had witnessed in London, was sufficiently 
aware of the tendencies of my own thoughts to do all I could 
to counteract them. I was, indeed, like a person who accord- 
ing to the old legend, had entered the cave of Prophonius; 
and the remedies I sought were to force myself into society, 
and to keep my understanding in continual activity upon mat- 
ters of science. But for these remedies, I should certainly have 
become hypochondriacally melancholy. In after years, how- 
ever, when my cheerfulness was more fully reestablished, I 
yielded to my natural inclination for a solitary life. And at 
that time I often fell into these reveries upon taking opium; 
and more than once it has happened to me, on a summer 
night, when I have been at an open window, in a room from 
which I could overlook the sea at a mile below me, and could 
command a view of the great town of Liverpool, at about the 
same distance, that I have sat from sunset to sunrise, motion- 
less, and without wishing to move. 

I shall be charged with mysticism, Behmenism, quietism, 
etc.; but that shall not alarm me. Sir Henry Vane, the 
younger, was one of our wisest men; and let my readers see if 
he, in his philosophical works, be half as unmystical as I am. I 
say, then, that it has often struck me that the scene itself was 
somewhat typical of what took place in such a reverie. The 
town of Liverpool represented the earth, with its sorrows and 
its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly for- 
gotten. The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and 
brooded over by dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the 
mind, and the mood which then swayed it. For it seemed to 
me as if then first I stood at a distance, and aloof from the 
uproar of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife, were 
suspended; a respite granted from the secret burdens of the 
heart; a sabbath of repose; a resting from human labors. 
Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of Hfe, recon- 
ciled with the peace which is in the grave; motions of the intel- 
lect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon 
calm; a tranquility that seemed no product of inertia, but as if 
resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite activi- 
ties, infinite repose. 

O just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor 
and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for 
" the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel," bringest an assuag- 
ing balm; — eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric 
stealest away the purposes of wrath, and, to the guilty man, for 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 45 

one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed 
pure from blood ; and, to the proud man, a brief obHvion for 

"Wrongs unredressed, and insults unavenged;" 

that summonest to the chancery of dreams, for the triumphs 
of suffering innocence, false witnesses, and confoundest per- 
jury, and dost reverse the sentences of unrighteous judges; — 
thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic 
imagery of the brain, cities and temples, beyond the art of 
Phidias and Praxiteles, — beyond the splendor of Babylon and 
Hekatompylos, and, " from the anarchy of dreaming sleep,'' 
callest into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties, and 
the blessed household countenances, cleansed from the " dis- 
honors of the grave." Thou only givest these gifts to man; 
and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty 
opium ! 

Notes 

* This way of going off from the stage of life appears to have been 
well known in the seventeenth century, but at that time to have been 
considered a peculiar privilege of blood royal, and by no means to be 
allowed to druggists. For, about the year 1686, a poet of rather omi- 
nous name (and who, by the by, did ample justice to his name), 
namely, Mr. Flat-man, in speaking of the death of Charles II expresses 
his surprise that any prince should commit so absurd an act as dying; 
because, says he 

" Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear; 
They should abscond, that is, into the other world." 

*Of this, however, the learned appear latterly to have doubted; for, 
in a pirated edition of Buchan's Domestic Medicine, which I once 
saw in the hands of a farmer's wife, who was studying it for the 
benefit of her health, the doctor was made to say, — " Be particularly 
careful never to take above five-and-twenty ounces of laudanum at 
once." The true reading being probably five-and-twenty drops, which 
are held to be equal to about one grain of crude opium. 

' Amongst the great herd of travellers, who show sufficiently by their 
stupidity that they never held any intercourse with opium, I must cau- 
tion my readers especially against the brilliant author of " Anastasius." 
This gentleman, whose wit would lead one to presume him an opium- 
eater, has made it impossible to consider him in that character, from 
the grievous misrepresentation which he has given of its effects. 
Upon consideration, it must appear such to the author himself; for, 
waiving the errors I have insisted on in the text, which (and others) 
are adopted in the fullest manner, he will himself admit that an old 
gentleman, " with a snow-white beard,'* who eats " ample doses of 
opium," and is yet able to deliver what is meant and received as very 
weighty counsel on the bad effects of that practice, is but an indifferent 
evidence that opium either kills people prematurely, or sends them 
into a mad-house. But, for my part, I see into this old gentleman and 



46 DE QUINCEY 

his motives; the fact is, he was enamored of "the Httle golden recep- 
acle of the pernicious drug," which Anastasius carried about him; 
and no way of obtaining it so safe and so feasible occurred, as that 
of frightening its owner out of his wits (which, by the by, are none 
of the strongest). This commentary throws a new light upon the 
case, and greatly improves it as a story; for the old gentleman's 
speech, considered as a lecture on pharmacy, is highly absurd, but, 
considered as a hoax on Anastasius, it reads excellently. 

*This surgeon it was who first made me aware of the dangerous 
variability in opium as to strength under the shifting proportions of its 
combination with alien impurities. Naturally, as a man professionally 
alive to the danger of creating any artificial need of opium beyond what 
the anguish of his malady at any rate demanded, trembling every 
hour on behalf of his poor children, lest, by any indiscretion of his 
own, he should precipitate the crisis of his disorder, he saw the neces- 
sity of reducing the daily dose to a minimum. But to do this he must 
first obtain the means of measuring the quantities of opium; not the 
apparent quantities as determined by weighing, but the virtual quan- 
tities after allowing for the alloy or varying amounts of impurity. 
This, however, was a visionary problem. To allow for it was simply 
impossible. The problem, therefore, changed its character. Not to 
measure the impurities was the object; for, whilst entangled with the 
operative and efficient parts of the opium they could not be measured. 
To separate and eliminate the impure (or inert) parts, this was now 
the object. And this was effected finally by a particular mode of boil- 
ing the opium. That done, the residuum became equable in strength; 
and the daily doses could be nicely adjusted. About i8 grains formed 
his daily ration for many years. This, upon the common hospital 
equation, expresses i8 times 25 drops of laudanum. But since 25 is 
= ^-j^, therefore 18 times one quarter of a hundred is zzz one quarter 
of 1800, and that, 1 suppose is, 450. So much this surgeon averaged 
upon each day for about twenty years. Then suddenly began a 
fiercer stage of anguish from his disease. But then, also, the fight 
was finished, and the victory was won. All duties were fulfilled; his 
children prosperously launched in life; and death, which to himself 
was becoming daily more necessary as a relief from torment, now fell 
injuriously upon nobody. 

^ The late Duke of Norfolk. My authority was the late Sir George 
Beaumont, an old familiar acquaintance of the duke's. But such 
expressions are always liable to grievous misapplication. By " the 
late " duke. Sir George meant that duke once so well known to the 
nation as the partisan friend of Fox, Burke, Sheridan, etc., at the era 
of the great French Revolution, in 1789-1793. Since his time, I believe 
there have been three generations of ducal Howards — who are 
always interesting to the English nation, first, from the bloody historic 
traditions surrounding their great house; secondly, from the fact of 
their being at the head of the British Peerage. 

* Thrilling was the pleasure with which almost always I heard this 
angelic Grassini. Shivering with expectation I sat, when the time 
drew near for her golden epiphany; shivering I rose from my seat, 
incapable of rest, when that heavenly and harp-like voice sang its own 
victorious welcome in its prelusive " threttanelo — threttanelo." This 
is the beautiful representative echo by which Aristophanes expresses 
the sound of the Grecian phorminx, or of some other instrument, 
which conjecturally has been shown most to resemble our modern 



4 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 47 

European harp. In the case of ancient Hebrew instruments used in 
the temple service, random and idle must be all the guesses through 
the Greek Septuagint or the Latin Vulgate to identify any one of 
them. But as to Grecian instruments the case is different; always 
there is a remote chance of digging up some marble sculpture of 
orchestral appurtenances and properties. Yet all things change; this 
same Grassini, whom once I adored, afterwards, when gorged with 
English gold, went off to Paris; and when I heard on what terms she 
lived with a man so unmagnanimous as Napoleon, I came to hate her. 
Did I complain of any man's hating England, or teaching a woman 
to hate her benefactress? Not at all; but simply of his adopting at 
second hand the malice of a jealous nation, with which originally he 
could have had no sincere sympathy. Hate us, if you please; but not 
sycophantishly, by way of paying court to others. 

^I have not the book at this moment to consult; but I think the 
passage begins, " And even that tavern music, which makes one man 
merry, another mad, in me strikes a deep fit of devotion." 

^ In the large, capacious chimneys of the rustic cottages throughout 
the Lake District, you can see up the entire cavity from the seat which 
you occupy, as an honored visitor, in the chimney corner. There I 
used often to hear (though not to see) bees. Their murmuring was 
audible, though their bodily forms were too small to be visible at 
that altitude. On inquiry, I found that soot (chiefly from wood and 
peats) was useful in some stage of their wax or honey manufacture. 



Ill 



THE PAINS OF OPIUM 



COURTEOUS, and, I hope, indulgent reader (for all 
my readers must be indulgent ones, or else, I fear, I 
shall shock them too much to count on their courtesy), 
having accompanied me thus far, now let me request 
you to move onwards, for about eight years; that is to 
say, from 1804 (when I said that my acquaintance with 
opium first began) to 1812. The years of academic life 
are now over and gone, — almost forgotten; the student's 
cap no longer presses my temples; if my cap exists at all, it 
presses those of some youthful scholar, I trust, as happy as 
myself, and as passionate a lover of knowledge. My gown is, 
by this time, I dare to say, in the same condition with many 
thousands of excellent books in the Bodleian, namely, diH- 
gently perused by certain studious moths and worms; or 
departed, however (which is all that I know of its fate), to that 
great reservoir of somewhere, to which all the tea-cups, tea- 
caddies, tea-pots, tea-kettles, etc., have departed (not to speak 
of still frailer vessels, such as glasses, decanters, bed-makers, 
etc.), which occasional resemblances in the present generation 
of tea-cups, etc., remind me of having once possessed, but of 
whose departure and final fate, I, in common with most gowns- 
men of either university, could give, I suspect, but an obscure 
and conjectural history. The persecutions of the chapel-bell, 
sounding its unwelcome summons to six o'clock matins, inter- 
rupts my slumbers no longer; the porter who rang it, upon 
whose beautiful nose (bronze, inlaid with copper) I wrote, in 
retaliation, so many Greek epigrams whilst I was dressing, is 
dead, and has ceased to disturb anybody; and I, and many 
others who suffered much from his tintinabulous propensities, 
have now agreed to overlook his errors, and have forgiven him. 
Even with the bell I am now in charity ; it rings, I suppose, as 
formerly, thrice a day, and cruelly annoys, I doubt not, many 
worthy gentlemen, and disturbs their peace of mind; but, as 
to me, in this year 1812, I regard its treacherous voice no 
longer (treacherous I call it, for, by some refinement of malice, 

48 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 49 

it spoke in as sweet and silvery tones as if it had been inviting 
one to a party); its tones have no longer, indeed, power to 
reach me let the wind sit as favorable as the malice of the bell 
itself could wish; for I am two hundred and fifty miles away 
from it, and buried in the depth of mountains. And what am 
I doing amongst the mountains? Taking opium. Yes, but 
what else? Why, reader, in 1812, the year we are now arrived 
at, as well as for some years previous, I have been chiefly 
studying German metaphysics, in the writings of Kant, Fichte, 
Schelling, etc. And how, and in what manner, do I live? in 
short, what class or description of men do I belong to? I am 
at this period, namely, in 1812, living in a cottage; and with a 
single female servant (honi soit qui mal y pense), who, amongst 
my neighbors, passes by the name of my "house-keeper." 
And, as a scholar and a man of learned education, and in 
that sense a gentleman, I may presume to class myself as an 
unworthy member of that indefinite body called gentlemen. 
Partly on the ground I have assigned, perhaps, — partly 
because, from my having no visible calling or business, it is 
rightly judged that I must be Hving on my private fortune,— I 
am so classed by my neighbors ; and, by the courtesy of modern 
England, I am usually .addressed on letters, etc., Esquire, 
though having, I fear, in the rigorous construction of heralds, 
but slender pretensions to that distinguished honor;— yes, in 
popular estimation, I am X. Y. Z., Esquire, but not Justice of 
the Peace, nor Gustos Rotulorum. Am I married? Not yet. 
And I still take opium? On Saturday nights. And, perhaps, 
have taken it unblushingly ever since '' the rainy Sunday," and 
'* the stately Pantheon," and '' the beatific druggist " of 1804? 
Even so. And how do I find my health after all this opium- 
eating? in short, how do I do? Why, pretty well, I thank you, 
reader; in the phrase of ladies in the straw, " as well as can be 
expected." In fact, if I dared to say the real and simple truth 
(it must not be forgotten that hitherto I thought, to satisfy the 
theories of medical men, I ought to be ill) I was never better 
in my Hfe than in the spring of 1812; and I hope sincerely, 
that the quantity of claret, port, or "particular Madeira," 
which, in all probability, you, good reader, have taken and 
design to take, for every term of eight years, during your 
natural life, may as little disorder your health as mine was dis- 
ordered by opium I had taken for the eight years between 
1804 and 1812. Hence you may see again the danger of 
taking any medical advice from Anastasius;' in divinity, for 
aught I know, or law, he may be a safe counsellor, but not in 



50 DE QUINCEY 

medicine. No; it is far better to consult Dr. Buchan, as I 
did; for I never forgot that worthy man's excellent suggestion, 
and I was " particularly careful not to take above five-and- 
twenty ounces of laudanum." To this moderation and tem- 
perate use of the article I may ascribe it, I suppose, that 
as yet, at least (that is, in 1812), I am ignorant and unsus- 
picious of the avenging terrors which opium has in store for 
those who abuse its lenity. At the same time, I have been 
only a dilettante eater of opium; eight years' practice, even, 
with the single precaution of allowing sufficient intervals 
between every indulgence, has not been sufficient to make 
opium necessary to me as an article of daily diet. But now 
comes a different era. Move on, if you please, reader, to 1813. 
In the summer of the year we have just quitted, I had suffered 
much in bodily health from distress of mind connected with 
a very melancholy event. This event, being no ways related 
to the subject now before me, further than through bodily ill- 
ness which it produced, I need not more particularly notice. 
Whether this illness of 1812 had any share in that of 1813, I 
know not; but so it was, that, in the latter year, I was attacked 
by a most appalling irritation of the stomach, in all respects 
the same as that which had caused me so much suffering in 
youth, and accompanied by a revival of all the old dreams. 
This is the point of my narrative on which, as respects my 
own self-justification, the whole of what follows may be said to 
hinge. And here I find myself in a perplexing dilemma: — 
Either, on the one hand, I must exhaust the reader's patience, 
by such a detail of my malady, and of my struggles with it, 
as might suffice to establish the fact of my inability to wrestle 
any longer with irritation and constant suffering; or, on the 
other hand, by passing lightly over this critical part of my 
story I must forego the benefit of a stronger impression left 
on the mind of the reader, and must lay myself open to the 
misconstruction of having slipped by the easy and gradual 
steps of self-indulging persons, from the first to the final 
stage of opium-eating (a misconstruction to which there will 
be a lurking predisposition in most readers, from my previous 
acknowledgments). This is the dilemma, the first horn of 
which would be sufficient to toss and gore any column of 
patient readers, though drawn up sixteen deep, and con- 
stantly relieved by fresh men; consequently that is not to be 
thought of. It remains, then, that I postulate so much as is 
necessary for my purpose. And let me take as full credit for 
what I postulate as if I had demonstrated it, good reader, at 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 5 1 

the expense of your patience and my own. Be not so ungen- 
erous as to let me suffer in your good opinion through my 
own forbearance and regard for your comfort. No, beheve 
all that I ask of you, namely, that I could resist no longer, — 
believe it liberally, and as an act of grace, or else in mere pru- 
dence; for, if not, then, in the next edition of my Opium 
Confessions, revised and enlarged, I will make you believe, 
and tremble; and, a force d'ennuyer, by mere dint of pandicu- 
lation, I will terrify all readers of mine from ever again ques- 
tioning any postulate that I shall think fit to make. 

This, then, let me repeat : I postulate that, at the time I began 
to take opium daily, I could not have done otherwise. 
Whether, indeed, afterwards, I might not have succeeded in 
breaking off the habit, even when it seemed to me that all 
efforts would be unavailing, and whether many of the innumer- 
able efforts which I did make might not have been carried 
much further, and my gradual re-conquests of ground lost 
might not have been followed up much more energetically, — 
these are questions which I must decline. Perhaps I might 
make out a case of palliation; but — shall I speak ingenu- 
ously? — I confess it, as a besetting infirmity of mine, that I 
am too much of an Eudsemonist; I hanker too much after a 
state of happiness, both for myself and others; I cannot face 
misery, whether my own or not, with an eye of sufficient firm- 
ness; and am little capable of encountering present pain for 
the sake of any reversionary benefit. On some other mat- 
ters, I can agree with the gentlemen in the cotton trade ^ at 
Manchester in affecting the Stoic philosophy; but not in this. 
Here I take the liberty of an Eclectic philosopher, and I look 
out for some courteous and considerate sect that will conde- 
scend more to the infirm condition of an opium-eater; that 
are " sweet men," as Chaucer says, " to give absolution," and 
will show some conscience in the penances they inflict, and 
the efforts of abstinence they exact from poor sinners like 
myself. An inhuman moralist I can no more endure, in my 
nervous state, than opium that has not been boiled. At any 
rate, he who summons me to send out a large freight of self- 
denial and mortification upon any cruising voyage of moral 
improvement, must make it clear to my understanding that 
the concern is a hopeful one. At my time of life (six-and- 
thirty years of age), it cannot be supposed that I have much 
energy to spare; in fact, I find it all little enough for the 
intellectual labors I have on my hands; and, therefore, let no 



52 DE QUINCEY 

man expect to frighten me by a few hard words into embark- 
ing any part of it upon desperate adventures of moraHty. 

Whether desperate or not, however, the issue of the strug- 
gle in 1813 was what I have mentioned; and from this date 
the reader is to consider me as a regular and confirmed opium- 
eater, of whom to ask whether on any particular day he had 
or had not taken opium, would be to ask whether his lungs 
had performed respiration, or the heart fulfilled its functions. 
You understand now, reader, what I am; and you are by this 
time aware, that no old gentleman, '' with a snow-white beard," 
will have any chance of persuading me to surrender '' the little 
golden receptacle of the pernicious drug." No; I give notice 
to all, whether moralists or surgeons, that whatever be their 
pretensions and skill in their respective lines of practice, they 
must not hope for any countenance from me, if they think to 
begin by any savage proposition for a Lent or Ramadam of 
abstinence from opium. This, then, being all fully understood 
between us, we shall in future sail before the wind. Now, 
then, reader, from 1813, where all this time we have been 
sitting down and loitering, rise up, if you please, and walk 
forward about three years more. Now draw up the curtain, 
and you shall see me in a new character. 

If any man, poor or rich, were to say that he would tell us 
what had been the happiest day in his life, and the why and 
the wherefore, I suppose that we should all cry out. Hear him ! 
hear him ! As to the happiest day, that must be very difficult 
for any wise man to name; because any event, that could 
occupy so distinguished a place in a man's retrospect of his 
life, or be entitled to have shed a special felicity on any one 
day, ought to be of such an enduring character, as that (acci- 
dents apart) it should have continued to shed the same felicity, 
or one not distinguishably less, on many years together. To 
the happiest lustrum, however, or even to the happiest year, 
it may be allowed to any man to point without discountenance 
from wisdom. This year, in my case, reader, was the one 
which we have ngw reached; though it stood, I confess, as a 
parenthesis between years of a gloomier character. It was a 
year of brilliant water (to speak after the manner of jewellers), 
set, as it were, and insulated, in the gloom and cloudy melan- 
choly of opium. Strange as it may sound, I had a little 
before this time descended suddenly, and without any con- 
siderable effort, from three hundred and twenty grains of 
opium (that is, eight" thousand drops of laudanum) per day, 
to forty grains, or one-eighth part. Instantaneously, and as 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER 53 

if by magic, the cloud of profoundest melancholy which rested 
upon my brain, like some black vapors that I have seen roll 
away frorn the summits of mountains, drew off in one day; 
passed off with its murky banners as simultaneously as a ship 
that has been stranded, and is floated off by a spring tide, — 

" That moveth altogether, if it move at all." 

Now, then, I was again happy: I now took only one thou- 
sand drops of laudanum per day, — and what was that? A 
latter spring had come to close up the season of youth: my 
brain performed its functions as healthily as ever before. I 
read Kant again, and again I understood him, or fancied that 
I did. Again my feelings of pleasure expanded themselves to 
all around me; and, if any man from Oxford or Cambridge, 
or from neither, had been announced to me in my unpretend- 
ing cottage, I should have welcomed him with as sumptuous 
a reception as so poor a man could offer. Whatever else was 
wanting to a wise man's happiness, of laudanum I would have 
given him as much as he wished, and in a golden cup. And, 
by the way, now that I speak of giving laudanum away, I 
remember, about this time, a little incident, which I mention, 
because, trifling as it wag, the reader will soon meet it again 
in my dreams, which it influenced more fearfully than could 
be imagined. One day a Malay knocked at my door. What 
business a Malay could have to transact amongst English 
mountains, I cannot conjecture; but possibly he was on his 
road to a seaport about forty miles distant.* 

The servant who opened the door to him was a young girl, 
born and bred amongst the mountains, who had never seen 
an Asiatic dress of any sort: his turban, therefore, confounded 
her not a little; and as it turned out that his attainments in 
English were exactly of the same extent as hers in the Malay, 
there seemed to be an impassable gulf fixed between all com- 
munication of ideas, if either party had happened to possess 
any. In this dilemma, the girl, recollecting the reputed learn- 
ing of her master (and, doubtless, giving me credit for a 
knowledge of all the languages of the earth, besides, perhaps, 
a few of the lunar ones), came and gave me to understand 
that there was a sort of demon below, whom she clearly imag- 
ined that my art could exorcise from the house. I did not 
immediately go down; but when I did, the group which pre- 
sented itself, arranged as it was by accident, though not very 
elaborate, took hold of my fancy and my eye in a way that 
none of the statuesque attitudes exhibited in the ballets at the 



54 DE QUINCEY 

Opera-house, though so ostentatiously complex, had ever 
done. In a cottage kitchen, but panelled on the wall with 
dark wood, that from age and rubbing resembled oak, and 
looking more like a rustic hall of entrance than a kitchen, 
stood the Malay, his turban and loose trousers of dingy white 
relieved upon the dark panelling; he had placed himself nearer 
to the girl than she seemed to reHsh, though her native spirit 
of mountain intrepidity contended with the feeling of simple 
awe which her countenance expressed, as she gazed upon the 
tiger-cat before her. And a more striking picture there could 
not be imagined, than the beautiful English face of the girl, 
and its exquisite fairness, together with her erect and inde- 
pendent attitude, contrasted with the sallow and bilious skin 
of the Malay, enamelled or veneered with mahogany by 
marine air, his small, fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, slavish 
gestures, and adorations. Half hidden by the ferocious-look- 
ing Malay, was a little child from a neighboring cottage, who 
had crept in after him, and was now in the act of reverting its 
head and gazing upwards at the turban and the fiery eyes 
beneath it, whilst with one hand he caught at the dress of the 
young woman for protection. 

My knowledge of the Oriental tongues is not remarkably 
extensive, being, indeed, confined to two words, — the Arabic 
word for barley, and the Turkish for opium (madjoon), which 
I have learnt from Anastasius. And, as I had neither a 
Malay dictionary, nor even Adelung's " Mithridates," which 
might have helped me to a few words, I addressed him in 
some lines from the Iliad; considering that, of such language 
as I possessed, the Greek, in point of longitude, came geo- 
graphically nearest to an Oriental one. He worshipped me 
in a devout manner, and replied in what I suppose was Malay. 
In this way I saved my reputation with my neighbors ; for the 
Malay had no means of betraying the secret. He lay down 
upon the floor for about an hour, and then pursued his jour- 
ney. On his departure, I presented him with a piece of 
opium. To him, as an Orientalist, I concluded that opium 
must be familiar, and the expression of his face convinced 
me that it was. Nevertheless, I was struck with some little 
consternation when I saw him suddenly raise his hand to his 
mouth, and (in the school-boy phrase) bolt the whole, 
divided into three pieces, at one mouthful. The quantity was 
enough to kill three dragoons and their horses, and I felt 
some alarm for the poor creature; but what could be done? 
I had given him the opium in compassion for his solitary life. 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER, 55 

on recollecting that, if he had travelled on foot from London 
it must be nearly three weeks since he could have exchanged 
a thought with any human being. I could not thmk of vio- 
lating the laws of hospitality by having him seized and 
drenched with an' emetic, and thus frightemng him into a 
notion that we were going to sacrifice him to some English 
idol No; there was clearly no help for it. He took his 
leave, and for some days I felt anxious; but, as I never heard 
of any Malay being found dead, I became convinced that he 
was used^ to opium, and that I must have done him the ser- 
vice I designed, by giving him one night of respite from the 
pains of wandering. . , . 

This incident I have digressed to mention, because this 
Malay (partly from the picturesque exhibition he assisted to 
frame, partly from the anxiety I connected with his iniage for 
some days) fastened afterwards upon my dreams, and brought 
other Malays with him worse than himself, that ran a-mucR 
at me and led me into a world of troubles. But, to quit this 
episode, and to return to my intercalary year of happiness, i 
have said already, that on a subject so important to us all as 
happiness, we should Usten with pleasure to any man s experi- 
ence or experiments, ev.en though he were but a ploughboy, 
who cannot be supposed to have ploughed very deep in such 
an intractable soil as that of human pains and pleasures, or 
to have conducted his researches upon any very enhghtened 
principles. But I, who have taken happiness, both m a solid 
and a Hquid shape, both boiled and unboiled, both East India 
and Turkey, — who have conducted my experiments upon 
this interesting subject with a sort of galvanic battery, — and 
have for the general belief of the world, inoculated myself, 
as it were, with the poison of eight hundred drops of lauda- 
num per day (just for the same reason as a French surgeon 
inoculated himself lately with a cancer, — an Enghsti one, 
twenty years ago, with plague, — and a third, I know not of 
what nation, wkh' hydrophobia), - I, it will be admitted must 
surely know what happiness is, if anybody does. And there- 
fore I will here lay down an analysis of happiness, and, as 
the most interesting mode of communicating it, I wiU give 
it, not didactically, but wrapt up and mvolved in a p cture 
o one evening, as I spent every evening during the inter- 
calary year when laudanum, though taken daily, was to me 
no more than the elixir of pleasure. This done, I shall quit 
the subject of happiness altogether, and pass to a very differ- 
ent one, — the pains of opium. 



56 DE QUINCE Y 

Let there be a cottage, standing in a valley/ eighteen miles 
from any town; no spacious valley, but about two miles long 
by three quarters of a mile in average width, — the benefit of 
which provision is, that all the families resident within its 
circuit will compose, as it were, one larger household, per- 
sonally familiar to your eye, and more or less interesting to 
your aflfections. Let the mountains be real mountains, be- 
tween three and four thousand feet high, and the cottage a 
real cottage, not (as a witty author has it) " a cottage with 
a double coach-house; " let it be, in fact (for I must abide by 
the actual scene), a white cottage, embowered with flowering 
shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession of flowers upon 
the walls, and clustering around the windows, through all 
the months of spring, summer, and autumn; beginning, in 
fact, with May roses, and ending with jasmine. Let it, how- 
ever, not be spring, nor summer, nor autumn; but winter, in 
its sternest shape. This is a most important point in the 
science of happiness. And I am surprised to see people over- 
look it and think it matter of congratulation that winter is 
going, or, if coming, is not likely to be a severe one. On the 
contrary, I put up a petition, annually, for as much snow, hail, 
frost, or storm of one kind or other, as the skies can possibly 
afford us. Surely everybody is aware of the divine pleasures 
which attend a winter fireside, — candles at four o'clock, 
warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, cur- 
tains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind 
and rain are raging audibly without, 

" And at the doors and windows seem to call 
As heaven and earth they would together mell; 
Yet the least entrance find they none at all; 
Whence sweeter grows our rest secure in massy hall." * 

All these are items in the description of a v/inter evening 
which must surely be familiar to everybody born in a high 
latitude. And it is evident that most of these delicacies, like 
ice-cream, require a very low temperature of the atmosphere 
to produce them: they are fruits which cannot be ripened 
without weather stormy or inclement, in some way or other. 
I am not "particular," as people say, whether it be snow, or 

black frost, or wind so strong that (as Mr. ^ says) " you 

may lean your back against it like a post." I can put up even 

with rain, provided that it rains cats and dogs; but something 

of the sort I must have ; and if I have not, I think myself in a 

* Castle of Indolence. 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 57 

manner ill used: for why am I called on to pay so heavily for 
winter, in coals, and candles, and various privations that will 
occur even to gentlemen, if I am not to have the article good 
of its kind? No: a Canadian winter, for my money; or a 
Russian one, where every man is but a co-proprietor with 
the north wind in the fee-simple of his own ears. Indeed so 
ereat an epicure am I in this matter that I cannot relish a 
winter night fully, if it be much past St. Thomas day, and 
have degenerated into disgusting tendencies to vernal appear- 
ances; -- no, it must be divided by a thick wall of dark mghts 
from all return of light and sunshine. From the latter weeks 
of October to Christmas-eve, therefore, is the period during 
which happiness is in season, which, in my judgment, enters 
the room with the tea-tray; for tea, though ridiculed by those 
who are naturally of coarse nerves, or are become so from 
wine-drinking, and are not susceptible of influence from so 
refined a stimulant, will always be the favorite beverage of 
the intellectual; and, for my part, I would have jomed Dr. 
Johnson in a bellum internecium against Jonas Hanway, or any 
other impious person who should presume to disparage it 
But here to save myself the trouble of too much verbal 
description, I will introduce a painter, and give him directions 
for the rest of the picture. Painters do not like white cot- 
tages, unless a good deal weather-stained; but, as the reader 
now understands that it is a winter night, his services will not 
be required except for the inside of the house. 

Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twe ve, and not 
more than seven and a half feet high. This, reader, is some- 
what ambitiously styled, in my family, the drawing-room; but 
being contrived ^^ a double debt to pay," it is also, and more 
justly, termed the library: for it happens that books are the 
only article of property in which I am richer than my neigh- 
bors Of these I have about five thousand, collected gradu- 
ally 'since my eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, put as 
many as you can into this room. Make it populous with 
books- and, furthermore, paint me a good fire; and furniture 
plain and modest, befitting the unpretending cottage ot a 
scholar. And near the fire paint me a tea-table; and (as it 
is clear that no creature can come to see one, such a stormy 
nieht) place only two cups and saucers on the tea-tray; ana, 
if you know how to paint such a thing symbolically, or other- 
wise, paint me an eternal tea-pot,- eternal a parte ante, and 
a parte post; for I usually drink tea from eight o'clock at 
night to four in the morning. And, as it is very unpleasant 



58 DE QUINCEY 

to make tea, or to pour it out for one's self, paint me a lovely 
young woman, sitting at the table. Paint her arms like 
Aurora's, and her smiles like Hebe's; — but no, dear M., not 
even in jest let me insinuate that thy power to illuminate my 
cottage rests upon a tenure so perishable as mere personal 
beauty; or that the witchcraft of angelic smiles lies within the 
empire of any earthly pencil. Pass, then, my good painter, 
to something more within its power; and the next article 
brought forward should naturally be myself, — a picture of 
the Opium-eater, with his " little golden receptacle of the 
pernicious drug " lying beside him on the table. As to the 
opium, I have no objection to see a picture of that, though I 
would rather see the original; you may paint it, if you choose; 
but I apprize you that no " little " receptacle would, even in 

1816, answer my purpose, who was at a distance from the 
" stately Pantheon," and all druggists (mortal or otherwise). 
No: you may as well paint the real receptacle, which was not 
of gold, but of glass, and as much like a wine-decanter as 
possible. Into this you may put a quart of ruby-colored 
laudanum; that, and a book of German metaphysics placed by 
its side, will sufficiently attest my being in the neighborhood; 
but as to myself, there I demur. I admit that, naturally, I 
ought to occupy the foreground of the picture ; that being the 
hero of the piece, or (if you choose) the criminal at the bar, 
my body should be had into court. This seems reasonable; 
but why should I confess, on this point, to a painter? or, why 
confess at all? If the public (into whose private ear I am 
confidentially whispering my confessions, and not into any 
painter's) should chance to have framed some agreeable pic- 
ture for itself of the Opium-eater's exterior, — should have 
ascribed to him, romantically, an elegant person, or a hand- 
some face, why should I barbarously tear from it so pleasing 
a delusion, — both to the public and to me? No: paint me, 
if at all, according to your own fancy ; and, as a painter's fancy 
should teem with beautiful creations, I cannot fail, in that 
way, to be a gainer. And now, reader, we have run through 
all the ten categories of my condition, as it stood about 1816 — 

181 7, up to the middle of which latter year I judge myself to 
have been a happy man; and the elements of that happiness 
I have endeavored to place before you, in the above sketch of 
the interior of a scholar's library, — in a cottage among the 
mountains, on a stormy winter evening. 

But now farewell, a long farewell, to happiness, winter or 
summer! farewell to smiles and laughter! farewell to peace 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 59 

of mind! farewell to hope and to tranquil dreams, and to the 
blessed consolations of sleep! For more than three years 
and a half I am summoned away from these; I am now 
arrived at an Iliad of woes : for I have now to record the pains 
of opium. 

" As when some great painter dips 
His pencil in the gloom of earthquakes and eclipse." * 

Reader, who have thus far accompanied me, I must 
request your attention to a brief explanatory note on three 
points : 

1. For several reasons, I have not been able to compose 
the notes for this part of my narrative into any regular and 
connected shape. I give the notes disjointed as I find them, 
or have now drawn them up from memory. Some of them 
point to their own date; some I have dated; and some are 
undated. Whenever it could answer my purpose to trans- 
plant them from the natural or chronological order, I have 
not scrupled to do so. Sometimes I speak in the present, 
sometimes in the past tense. Few of the notes, perhaps, were 
written exactly at the period of time to which they relate; 
but this can little affect, their accuracy, as the impressions 
were such that they can never fade from my mind. Much 
has been omitted. I could not, without effort, constrain 
myself to the task of either recalling, or constructing into a 
regular narrative, the whole burden of horrors which lies upon 
my brain. This feehng, partly, I plead in excuse, and partly 
that I am now in London, and am a helpless sort of person, 
who cannot even arrange his own papers without assistance; 
and I am separated from the hands which are wont to perform 
for me the offices of an amanuensis. 

2. You will think, perhaps, that I am too confidential and 
communicative of my own private history. It may be so. 
But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow 
my own humors, than much to consider who is listening to 
me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to 
this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any 
part at all is proper. The fact is, I place myself at a distance 
of fifteen or twenty years ahead of this time, and suppose 
myself writing to those who will be interested about me here- 
after; and wishing to have some record of a time, the entire 
history of which no one can know but myself, I do it as fully 
as I am able with the efforts I am now capable of making, 

* Shelley's "Revolt of Islam." 



6o DE QUINCEY 

because I know not whether I can ever find time to do it 
again. 

3. It will occur to you often to ask, Why did I not release 
myself from the horrors of opium, by leaving it ofif, or dimin- 
ishing it? To this I must answer briefly; it might be sup- 
posed that I yielded to the fascinations of opium too easily; 
it cannot be supposed that any man can be charmed by its 
terrors. The reader may be sure, therefore, that I made 
attempts innumerable to reduce the quantity. I add, that 
those who witnessed the agonies of those attempts, and not 
myself, were the first to beg me to desist. But could not I 
have reduced it a drop a day, or, by adding water, have 
bisected or trisected a drop? A thousand drops bisected would 
thus have taken nearly six years to reduce; and that they 
would certainly not have answered. But this is a common mis- 
take of those who know nothing of opium experimentally; 
I appeal to those who do, whether it is not always found that 
down to a certain point it can be reduced with ease, and even 
pleasure, but that, after that point, further reduction causes 
intense sufifering. Yes, say many thoughtless persons, who 
know not what they are talking of, you will sufifer a little low 
spirits and dejection, for a few days. I answer, no; there is 
nothing like low spirits; on the contrary, the mere animal 
spirits are uncommonly raised; the pulse is improved; the 
health is better. It is not there that the suffering lies. It has 
no resemblance to the sufferings caused by renouncing wine. 
It is a state of unutterable irritation of stomach (which surely 
is not much like dejection), accompanied by intense perspira- 
tions, and feelings such as I shall not attempt to describe 
without more space at my command. 

I shall now enter " in medias res,'' and shall anticipate, from 
a time when my opium pains might be said to be at their 
acme, an account of their palsying effects on the intellectual 
faculties. 

My studies have now been long interrupted. I cannot read 
to myself with any pleasure, hardly with a moment's endur- 
ance. Yet I read aloud sometimes for the pleasure of others; 
because reading is an accomplishment of mine, and, in the 
slang use of the word accomplishment as a superficial and orna- 
mental attainment, almost the only one I possess; and for- 
merly, if I had any vanity at all connected with any endow- 
ment or attainment of mine, it was with this; for I had ob- 
served that no accomplishment was so rare. Players are the 
worst readers of all: Kemble reads vilely; and Mrs. Siddons, 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 6 1 

who is so celebrated, can read nothing well but dramatic com- 
positions; Milton she cannot read sufferably. People in gen- 
eral either, read poetry without any passion at all, or else 
overstep the modesty of nature, and read not like scholars. 
Of late, if I have felt moved by anything in books, it has been 
by the grand lamentations of Samson Agonistes, or the great 
harmonies of the Satanic speeches in '' Paradise Regained," 
when read aloud by myself. A young lady sometimes comes 
and drinks tea with us; at her request and M.'s, I now and then 
read Wordsworth's poems to them. (Wordsworth, by the by, 
is the only poet I ever met who could read his own verses; 
often, indeed, he reads admirably.) 

For nearly two years I believe that I read no book but one; 
and I owe it to the author, in discharge of a great debt of 
gratitude to mention what that was. The sublimer and more 
passionate poets I still read, as I have said, by snatches, and 
occasionally. But my proper vocation, as I well knew, was 
the exercise of the analytic understanding. Now, for the most 
part, analytic studies are continuous, and not to be pursued 
by fits and starts, or fragmentary efforts. Mathematics, for 
instance, intellectual philosophy, etc., were all become insup- 
portable to me; I shrunk .from them with a sense of powerless 
and infantine feebleness that gave me an anguish the greater 
from remembering the time when I grappled with them to 
my own hourly delight; and for this further reason, because 
I had devoted the labor of my whole Hfe, and had dedicated 
my intellect, blossoms and fruits, to the slow and elaborate 
toil of constructing one single work, to which I had presumed 
to give the title of an unfinished work of Spinosa's, namely, 
" De Emendatione Humani Intellectus." This was now lying 
locked up as by frost, like any Spanish bridge or aqueduct, 
begun upon too great a scale for the resources of the architect; 
and, instead of surviving me as a monument of wishes at least, 
and aspirations, and a life of labor dedicated to the exaltation 
of human nature in that way in which God had best fitted me 
to promote so great an object, it was likely to stand a memor- 
ial to my children of hopes defeated, of baffled efforts, of 
materials uselessly accumulated, of foundations laid that were 
never to support a superstructure, of the grief and the ruin 
of the architect. In this state of imbecility, I had, for amuse- 
ment, turned my attention to political economy; my under- 
standing, which formerly had been as active and restless as 
a hyena, could not, I suppose (so long as I lived at all), sink 
into utter lethargy; and political economy offers this advan- 



62 DE QUINCEY 

tage to a person in my state, that though it is eminently an 
organic science (nO' part, that is to say, but what acts on 
the whole, as the whole again reacts on each part), yet the 
several parts may be detached and contemplated singly. 
Great as was the prostration of my powers at this time, yet I 
could not forget my knowledge; and my understanding had 
been for too many years intimate with severe thinkers, with 
logic, and the great masters of knowledge, not to be aware of 
the utter feebleness of the main herd of modern economists. 
I had been led in 1811 to look into loads of books and 
pamphlets on many branches of economy; and, at my desire, 
M. sometimes read to me chapters from more recent works, 
or parts of parliamentary debates. I saw that these were 
generally the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect; 
and that any man of sound head, and practised in wielding 
logic with scholastic adroitness, might take up the whole acad- 
emy of modern economists, and throttle them between heaven 
and earth with his finger and thumb, or bray their fungous 
heads to powder with a lady's fan. At length, in 1819, a 
friend in Edinburgh sent me down Mr. Ricardo's book; and, 
recurring to my own prophetic anticipation of the advent of 
some legislator for this science, I said, before I had finished 
the first chapter, '' Thou art the man ! " Wonder and curi- 
osity were emotions that had long been dead in me. Yet I 
wondered once more: I wondered at myself that I could once 
again be stimulated to the effort of reading; and much more 
I wondered at the book. Had this profound work been 
really written in England during the nineteenth century? 
Was it possible? I supposed thinking" had been extinct in 
England. Could it be that an EngHshman, and he not in 
academic bowers, but oppressed by mercantile and senatorial 
cares, had accomplished what all the universities of Europe, 
and a century of thought, had failed even to advance by one 
hair's breadth? All other writers had been crushed and over- 
laid by the enormous weights of facts and documents; Mr. 
Ricardo had deduced, a priori, from the understanding itself, 
laws which first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos 
of materials, and had constructed what had been but a collec- 
tion of tentative discussions into a science of regular propor- 
tions, now first standing on an eternal basis. 

Thus did one simple work of a profound understanding 
avail to give me a pleasure and an activity which I had not 
known for years; — it roused me even to write, or, at least, 
to dictate what M. wrote for me. It seemed to me that some 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 63. 

important truths had escaped even " the inevitable eye " of 
Mr. Ricardo; and, as these were, for the most part, of such a 
nature that I could express or illustrate them more briefly 
and elegantly by algebraic symbols than in the usual clumsy 
and loitering diction of economists, the whole would not have 
filled a pocket-book; and being so brief, with M. for my 
amanuensis, even at this time, incapable as I was of all gen- 
eral exertion, I drew up my " Prolegomena to all Future Sys- 
tems of Political Economy." I hope it will not be found redo- 
lent of opium; though, indeed, to most people, the subject 
itself is a sufficient opiate. 

This exertion, however, was but a temporary flash, as the 
sequel showed; for I designed to publish my work. Arrange- 
ments were made at a provincial press, about eighteen miles 
distant, for printing it. An additional compositor was re- 
tained for some days, on this account. The work was even 
twice advertised; and I was, in a manner, pledged to the ful- 
fillment of my intention. But I had a preface to write; and 
a dedication, which I wished to make a splendid one, to Mr. 
Ricardo. I found myself quite unable to accompHsh all this. 
The arrangements were countermanded, the compositor dis- 
missed, and my " Prolegoi^iena " rested peacefully by the side 
of its elder and more dignified brother. 

I have thus described and illustrated my intellectual torpor, 
in terms that apply, more or less, to every part of the four 
years during which I was under the Circean spells of opium. 
But for misery and suffering, I might, indeed, be said to have 
existed in a dormant state. I seldom could prevail on myself 
to write a letter; an answer of a few words, to any that I 
received, was the utmost that I could accomplish; and often 
that not until the letter had lain weeks, or even months, on 
my writing-table. Without the aid of M., all records of bills 
paid, or to be paid, must have perished; and my whole domes- 
tic economy, whatever became of Political Economy, must 
have gone into irretrievable confusion. I shall not afterwards 
allude to this part of the case; it is one, however, which the 
opium-eater will find, in the end, as oppressive and tormenting 
as any other, from the sense of incapacity and feebleness, from 
the direct embarrassments incident to the neglect or procras- 
tination of each day's appropriate duties, and from the remorse 
which must often exasperate the stings of these evils to a 
reflective and conscientious mind. The opium-eater loses 
none of his moral sensibiHties or aspirations; he wishes and 
longs as earnestly as ever to realize what he believes possible, 



64 DE QUINCEY 

and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehen- 
sion of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of 
execution only, but even of power to attempt. He lies under 
the weight of incubus and night-mare; he Hes in sight of all 
that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly confined to 
his bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease, who is 
compelled to witness injury or outrage to some object of his 
tenderest love : — he curses the spells which chain him down 
from motion; he would lay down his life if he might but get 
up and walk ; but he is powerless as an infant, and cannot even 
attempt to rise. 

I now pass to what is the main subject of these latter con- 
fessions, to the history and journal of what took place in my 
dreams; for these were the immediate and proximate cause 
of my acutest suffering. 

The first notice I had of any important change going on in 
this part of my physical economy, was from the reawaking of 
a state of eye generally incident to childhood, or exalted states 
of irritability. I know not whether my reader is aware that 
many children, perhaps most, have a power of painting, as it 
were, upon the darkness, all sorts of phantoms: in some that 
power is simply a mechanic affection of the eye; others have 
a voluntary or semi-voluntary power to dismiss or summon 
them; or, as a child once said to me, when I questioned him on 
this matter, " I can tell them to go, and they go; but some- 
times they come when I don't tell them to come." Where- 
upon I told him that he had almost as unlimited a command 
over apparitions as a Roman centurion over his soldiers. In 
the middle of 1817, I think it was that this faculty became 
positively distressing to me: at night, when I lay awake in 
bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp; friezes 
of never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and 
solemn as if they were stories drawn from times before 
Oedipus or Priam, before Tyre, before Memphis. And, at 
the same time, a corresponding change took place in my 
dreams; a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up 
within my brain, which presented, nightly, spectacles of more 
than earthly splendor. And the four following facts may 
be mentioned, as noticeable at this time: 

I. That, as the creative state of the eye increased, a sym- 
pathy seemed to arise between the waking and the dreaming 
states of the brain in one point, — that whatsoever I happened 
to call up and to trace by a voluntary act upon the darkness 
was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams; so that I feared 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 65 

to exercise this faculty ; for, as Midas turned all things to gold, 
that yet baffled his hopes and defrauded his human desires, 
so whatsoever things capable of being visually represented I 
did but think of in the darkness, immediately shaped them- 
selves into phantoms of the eye ; and, by a process apparently 
no less inevitable, when thus once traced in faint and visionary 
colors, like writings in sympathetic ink, they were drawn 
out, by the fierce chemistry of my dreams, into insufferable 
splendor that fretted rhy heart. 

II. For this, and all other changes in my dreams, were 
accompanied by deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, 
such as are wholly incommunicable by words. I seemed 
every night to descend — not metaphorically, but literally to 
descend — into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below 
depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever 
ascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I had ascended. 
This I do not dwell upon; because the state of gloom which 
attended these gorgeous spectacles, amounting at least to 
utter darkness, as of some suicidal despondency, cannot be 
approached by words. 

III. The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, 
were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, etc., 
were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is 
not fitted to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an 
extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not dis- 
turb me so much as the vast expansion of time. I sometimes 
seemed to have lived for seventy or one hundred years in 
one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a 
millennium, passed in that time, or, however, of a duration 
far beyond the limits of any human experience. 

IV. The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten 
scenes of later years, were often revived. I could not be said 
to recollect them ; for if I had been told of them when waking, 
I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts 
of my past experience. But placed as they were before me, 
in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent 
circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognized them 
instantaneously. I was once told by a near relative of mine, 
that having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on 
the very verge of death but for the critical assistance which 
reached her, she saw in a moment her whole life, in its 
minutest incidents, arrayed before her simultaneously as in 
a mirror; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for 
comprehending the whole and every part.^" This, from some 



66 DE QUINCEY 

Opium experiences of mine, I can believe; I have, indeed, seen 
the same thing asserted twice in modern books, and accom- 
panied by a remark which I am convinced is true, namely, 
that the dread book of account, which the Scriptures speak 
of, is, in fact, the mind itself of each individual. Of this, at 
least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting 
possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may and will inter- 
pose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret 
inscriptions on the mind. Accidents of the same sort will 
also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, 
the inscription remains forever; just as the stars seem to 
withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, in fact, 
we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as 
a veil; and that they are waiting to be revealed, when the 
obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn. 

Having noticed these four facts as memorably distinguish- 
ing my dreams from those of health, I shall now cite a case 
illustrative of the first fact ; and shall then cite any others that 
I remember, either in their chronological order, or any other 
that may give them more effect as pictures to the reader. 

I had been in youth, and even since, for occasional amuse- 
ment, a great reader of Livy, whom I confess that I prefer, 
both for style and matter, to any other of the Roman his- 
torians; and I had often felt as most solemn and appalhng 
sounds, and most emphatically representative of the majesty 
of the Roman people, the two words so often occurring in 
Livy " Consul Romanus "; especially when the consul is intro- 
duced in his military character. I mean to say, that the words 
king, sultan, regent, etc., or any other titles of those who 
embody in their own persons the collective majesty of a great 
people, had less power over my reverential feelings. I had, 
also, though no great reader of history, made myself minutely 
and critically familiar with one period of English history, 
namely, the period of the Parliamentary War, having been 
attracted by the moral grandeur of some who figured in that 
day, and by the many interesting memoirs which survive those 
unquiet times. Both these parts of my lighter reading, hav- 
ing furnished me often with matter of reflection, now fur- 
nished me with matter for my dreams. Often I used to see, 
after painting upon the blank darkness, a sort of rehearsal 
whilst waking, a crowd of ladies, and perhaps a festival and 
dances. And I heard it said, or I said to myself, " These are 
English ladies from the unhappy times of Charles I. These 
are the wives and daughters of those who met in peace, and 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 67 

sat at the same tables, and were allied by marriage^ or by 
blood; and yet, after a certain day in August, 1642,'^ never 
smiled upon each other again, nor met but in the field of bat- 
tle; and at Marston Moor, at Newbury, or at Naseby, cut 
asunder all ties of love by the cruel sabre, and washed away 
in blood the memory of ancient friendship." The ladies 
danced, and looked as lovely as the court of George IV. Yet 
I knew, even in my dream, that they had been in the grave 
for nearly two centuries. This pageant would suddenly dis- 
solve; and, at a clapping of hands would be heard the heart- 
quaking sound of " Consul Romanus" ; and immediately came 
" sweeping by," in gorgeous paludaments, Paulus or Marius, 
girt around by a company of centurions, with the crimson 
tunic hoisted on a spear, and followed by the alalagmos of the 
Roman legions. 

Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's " An- 
tiquities of Rome," Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, de- 
scribed to me a set of plates by that artist, called his " Dreams," 
and which record the scenery of his own visions during the 
delirium of a fever. Some of them (I describe only from 
memory of Mr. Coleridge's account) represented vast Gothic 
halls; on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and 
machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, etc., 
expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance over- 
come. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived 
a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Pira- 
nesi himself. Follow the stairs a little further, and you per- 
ceive it to come to a sudden, abrupt termination, without any 
balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had 
reached the extremity, except into the depths below. What- 
ever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that 
his labors must in some way terminate here. But raise your 
eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher; on which 
again Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very 
brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more 
aerial flight of stairs is beheld; and again is poor Piranesi busy 
on his aspiring labors; and so on, until the unfinished stairs 
and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. 
With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction 
did my architecture proceed in dreams. In the early stage of 
my malady, the splendors of my dreams were indeed chiefly 
architectural; and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as 
was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds. 
From a great mxodern poet,'' I cite the part of a passage which 



58 DE QUINCEY 

describes as an appearance actually beheld in the clouds, what 
in many of its circumstances I saw frequently in sleep: 

" The appearance, instantaneously disclosed, 
Was of a mighty city — boldly say 
A wilderness of building sinking far 
And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth. 
Far sinking into splendor — without end! 
Fabric it seemed of diamond, and of gold. 
With alabaster domes and silver spires. 
And blazing terrace upon terrace, high 
Uplifted; here, serene pavilions bright, 
In avenues disposed; there towers begirt 
With battlements that on their restless fronts 
Bore stars — illumination of all gems! 
By earthly nature had the effect been wrought 
Upon the dark materials of the storm 
Now pacified; on them, and on the coves, 
And mountain-steeps and summits, whereunto 
The vapors had receded — taking there 
Their station under a cerulean sky," etc. etc. 

The subhme circumstance — *' battlements that on their 
restless fronts bore stars " — might have been copied from 
my architectural dreams, for it often occurred. We hear it 
reported of Dryden, and of Fuseli in modern times, that they 
thought proper to eat raw meat for the sake of obtaining 
splendid dreams: how much better, for such a purpose, to 
have eaten opium ; which yet I do not remember that any poet 
is recorded to have done, except the dramatist Shadwell; and 
in ancient days, Homer is, I think, rightly reputed to have 
known the virtues of opium. 

To my architecture succeeded dreams of lakes, and silvery 
expanses of water: these haunted me so much, that I feared 
(though possibly it will appear ludicrous to a medical man) 
that some dropsical state or tendency of the brain might thus 
be making itself (to use a metaphysical word) objective, and 
the sentient organ project itself as its own object. For two 
months I suffered greatly in my head — a part of my bodily 
structure which had hitherto been so clear from all touch or 
taint of weakness (physically, I mean), that I used to say of 
it, as the last Lord Orford said of his stomach, that it seemed 
Hkely to survive the rest of my person. Till now I had never 
felt a headache even, or any the slightest pain, except rheu- 
matic pains caused by my own folly. However, I got over 
this attack, though it must have been verging on something 
very dangerous. 

The waters now changed their character, — from translucent 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 69 

lakes, shining like mirrors, they now became seas and oceans. 
And now comes a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself 
like a scroll, through many months, promised an abiding tor- 
ment; and, in fact, it never left me until the winding up of my 
case. Hitherto the human face had often mixed in my 
dreams, but not despotically, nor with any special power of 
tormenting. But now that which I have called the tyranny 
of the human face, began to unfold itself. Perhaps some part 
of my London life might be answerable for this. Be that as 
it may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean 
the human face began to appear; the sea appeared paved with 
innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens; faces imploring, 
wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by 
myriads, by generations, by centuries: my agitation was infi- 
nite, my mind tossed, and surged with the ocean. 

May, 1818.— The Malay had been a fearful enemy for 
months. I have been every night, through his means, trans- 
ported into Asiatic scenes. I know not whether others share 
in my feelings on this point; but I have often thought that if 
I were compelled to forego England, and to live in China, 
and among Chinese manners and modes of Hfe and scenery, 
I should go mad. The 'causes of my horror He deep, and 
some of them must be common to others. Southern Asia, in 
general, is the seat of awful images and associations. As the 
cradle of the human race, it would alone have a dim and 
reverential feeling connected with it. But there are other 
reasons. No man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, and 
capricious superstitions of Africa, or of savage tribes else- 
where, afifect him in the way that he is affected by the ancient, 
monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions of Indostan, etc. 
The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, his- 
tories, modes of faith, etc., is so impressive, that to me the 
vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth 
in the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antedi- 
luvian man renewed. Even Englishmen, though not bred in 
any knowledge of such institutions, cannot but shudder at the 
mystic sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, and refused 
to mix, through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can any 
man fail to be awed by the names of the Ganges, or the 
Euphrates. It contributes much to these feelings, that South- 
ern Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of 
the earth most swarming with human life, the great ofiftctna 
gentium. Man is a weed in those regions. The vast empires, 
also, into which the enormous population of Asia has always 



yo DE QUINCEY 

been cast, give a further sublimity to the feeUngs associated 
with all oriental names or images. In China, over and above 
what it has in common with the rest of Southern Asia, I am 
terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier 
of utter abhorrence, and want of sympathy, placed between 
us by feeHngs deeper than I can analyze. I could sooner live 
with lunatics, or brute animals. All this, and much more than 
I can say, or have time to say, the reader must enter into, 
before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which 
these dreams of oriental imagery, and mythological tortures, 
impressed upon me. Under the connecting feeling of tropical 
heat and vertical sunlights, I brought together all creatures, 
birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appear- 
ances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled 
them together in China or Indostan. From kindred feelings, 
I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. 
I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by mon- 
keys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and 
was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms: I 
was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sac- 
rificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the for- 
ests of Asia: Vishnu hated me; Seeva laid wait for me. I 
came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they 
said, which the ibis and crocodile trembled at. I was buried, 
for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and 
sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. 
I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, 
confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds 
and Nilotic mud. 

I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my oriental 
dreams, which always filled me with such amazement at the 
monstrous scenery, that horror seemed absorbed, for a while, 
in sheer astonishment. Sooner or later came a reflux of feel- 
ing that swallowed up the astonishment, and left me, not so 
much in terror, as in hatred and abomination of what I saw. 
Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sight- 
less incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that 
drove me into an oppression as of madness. Into these 
dreams only, it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that 
any circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had 
been moral and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents 
were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles, especially the last. 
The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror 
than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him; 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 7 1 

and (as was always the case, almost, in my dreams) for cen- 
turies. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese 
houses with cane tables, etc. All the feet of the tables, sofas, 
etc., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of 
the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multi- 
plied into a thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and 
fascinated. And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my 
dreams, that many times the very same dream was broken up 
in the very same way: I heard gentle voices speaking to me 
(I hear everything when I am sleeping), and instantly I awoke: 
it was broad noon, and my children were standing, hand in 
hand, at my bedside; come to show me their colored shoes, 
or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. 
I protest that so awful was the transition from the damned 
crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions 
of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and of 
infancy, that, in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind, I 
wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces. 

June, 1 8 19. — I have had occasion to remark, at various 
periods of my Hfe, that the deaths of those whom we love, 
and, indeed, the contemplation of death generally, is (cseteris 
paribus) more affecting in summer than in any other season 
of the year. And the reasons are these three, I think: first, 
that the visible heavens in summer appear far higher, more 
distant, and (if such a solecism may be excused) more infinite; 
the clouds by which chiefly the eye expounds the distance of 
the blue pavilion stretched over our heads are in summer more 
voluminous, massed, and accumulated in far grander and more 
towering piles: secondly, the light and the appearances of 
the declining and the setting sun are much more fitted to 
be types and characters of the infinite: and, thirdly (which is 
the main reason), the exuberant and riotous prodigality of 
life naturally forces the mind more powerfully upon the antag- 
onist thought of death, and the wintry sterility of the grave. 
For it may be observed, generally, that wherever two thoughts 
stand related to each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, 
as it were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to suggest each 
other. On these accounts it is that I find it impossible to 
banish the thought of death when I am walking alone in the 
endless days of summer ; and any particular death, if not more 
affecting, at least haunts my mind more obstinately and 
besiegingly, in that season. Perhaps this cause, and a slight 
incident which I omit, might have been the immediate occa- 
sions of the following dream, to which, however, a predispo- 



72 DE QUINCE Y 

sition must always have existed in my mind; but having been 
once roused, it never left me, and spHt into a thousand fan- 
tastic varieties, which often suddenly reunited, and composed 
again the original dream. 

I thought that it was a Sunday morning in May; that it 
was Easter Sunday, and as yet very early in the morning. I 
was standing, as it seemed to me, at the door of my own cot- 
tage. Right before me lay the very scene which could really 
be commanded from that situation, but exalted, as was usual, 
and solemnized by the power of dreams. There were the same 
mountains, and the same lovely valley at their feet; but the 
mountains were raised to more than Alpine height, and there 
was interspace far larger between them of meadows and forest 
lawns; the hedges were rich with white roses; and no living 
creature was to be seen, excepting that in the green church- 
yard there were cattle tranquilly reposing upon the verdant 
graves, and particularly round about the grave of a child 
whom I had tenderly loved, just as I had really beheld them, 
a little before sunrise, in the same manner, when that child 
died. I gazed upon the well-known scene, and I said aloud 
(as I thought) to myself, *' It yet wants much of sunrise; and 
it is Easter Sunday; and that is the day on which they cele- 
brate the first fruits of resurrection. I will walk abroad; old 
griefs shall be forgotten to-day; for the air is cool and still, 
and the hills are high, and stretch away to heaven; and the 
forest glades are as quiet as the church-yard; and with the 
dew I can wash the fever from my forehead, and then I shall 
be unhappy no longer." And I turned, as if to open my gar- 
den gate; and immediately I saw upon the left a scene far 
different; but which yet the power of my dreams had recon- 
ciled into harmony with the other. The scene was an oriental 
one; and there also it was Easter Sunday, and very early in 
the morning. And at a vast distance were visible, as a stain 
upon the horizon, the domes and cupolas of a great city — an 
image or faint abstraction, caught, perhaps, in childhood, from 
some picture of Jerusalem. And not a bow-shot from me, 
upon a stone, and shaded by Judean palms, there sat a woman ; 
and I looked, and it was — Ann! She fixed her eyes upon 
me earnestly; and I said to her, at length, " So, then, I have 
found you, at last." I waited; but she answered me not a 
word. Her face was the same as when I saw it last, and 
yet, again, how different! Seventeen years ago, when the 
lamp-light fell upon her face, as for the last time I kissed her 
lips (lips, Ann, that to me were not polluted!), her eyes were 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 73 

streaming with tears ; — her tears were now wiped away ; she 
seemed more beautiful than she was at that time, but in all 
other points the same, and not older. Her looks were tran- 
quil, but with unusual solemnity of expression, and I now 
gazed upon her with some awe; but suddenly her countenance 
grew dim, and, turning to the mountains, I perceived vapors 
rolling between us ; in a moment, all had vanished ; thick dark- 
ness came on; and in the twinkling of an eye I was far away 
from mountains, and by lamp-light in Oxford street, walking 
again with Ann — just as we walked seventeen years before, 
when we were both children. 

As a final specimen, I cite one of a different character, from 
1820. 

The dream com.menced with a music which now I often 
heard in dreams — a music of preparation and of awakening 
suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, 
and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite 
cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. 
The morning was come of a mighty day — a day of crisis and 
of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysteri- 
ous eclipse, and laboring in some dread extremity. Some- 
where, I knew not wherq — somehow, I knew not how — by 
some beings, I knew not whom — a battle, a strife, an agony, 
was conducting, — was evolving Hke a great drama, or piece 
of music; with which my sympathy was the more insupport- 
able from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature, 
and its possible issue. I, as is usual in dreams (where, of 
necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement), had 
the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the 
power, if I could raise myself, to will it; and yet again had not 
the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or 
the oppression of inexpiable guilt. " Deeper than ever plum- 
met sounded," I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the pas- 
sion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake; some 
mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trum- 
pet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings 
to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives. I knew not 
whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; 
tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all 
was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all 
the world to me, and but a moment allowed, — and clasped 
hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then — everlasting 
farewells! and, with a sigh, such as the caves of hell sighed 
when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of 



74 DE QUINCEY 

death, the sound was reverberated — everlasting farewells! 
and again, and yet again reverberated — everlasting farewells ! 

And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud — "I will sleep 
no more! " 

But I am now called upon to wind up a narrative which has 
already extended to an unreasonable length. Within more 
spacious limits, the materials which I have used might have 
been better unfolded; and much which I have not used might 
have been added with effect. Perhaps, however, enough has 
been given. It now remains that I should say something of 
the way in which this conflict of horrors was finally brought 
to its crisis. The reader is already aware (from a passage near 
the beginning of the introduction to the first part) that the 
opium-eater has, in some way or other, ** unwound, almost to 
its final links, the accursed chain which bound him." By what 
means? To have narrated this, according to the original 
intention, would have far exceeded the space which can now 
be allowed. It is fortunate, as such a cogent reason exists for 
abridging it, that I should, on a maturer view of the case, have 
been exceedingly unwilling to injure, by any such unafifecting 
details, the impression of the history itself, as an appeal to the 
prudence and the conscience of the yet unconfirmed opium- 
eater, or even (though a very inferior consideration) to injure 
its effect as a composition. The interest of the judicious 
reader will not attach itself chiefly to the subject of the fasci- 
nating spells, but to the fascinating power. Not the opium- 
eater, but the opium, is the true hero of the tale, and the legiti- 
mate centre on which the interest revolves. The object was 
to display the marvellous agency of opium, w^hether for 
pleasure or for pain; if that is done, the action of the piece has 
closed. 

However, as some people, in spite of all laws to the contrary, 
will persist in asking what became of the opium-eater, and in 
what state he now is, I answer for him thus: The reader is 
aware that opium had long ceased to found its empire on 
spells of pleasure, it was solely by the tortures connected with 
the attempt to abjure it, that it kept its hold. Yet, as other 
tortures, no less, it may be thought, attended the non-abjuration 
of such a tyrant, a choice only of evils was left; and that might 
as well have been adopted, which, however terrific in itself, 
held out a prospect of final restoration to happiness. This 
appears true ; but good logic gave the author no strength to act 
upon it. However, a crisis arrived for the author's life, and a 
crisis for other objects still dearer to him, and which will always 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 75 

be far dearer to him than his life, even now that it is again a 
happy one. I saw that I must die, if I continued the opium; 
I determined, therefore, if that should be required, to die in 
throwing it off. How much I was at that time taking, I cannot 
say; for the opium which I used had been purchased for me 
by a friend, who afterwards refused to let me pay him; so that 
I could not ascertain even what quantity I had used within a 
year. I apprehend, however, that I took it very irregularly, 
and that I varied from about fifty or sixty grains to one hun- 
dred and fifty a day. My first task was to reduce it to forty, 
to thirty, and, as fast as I could, to twelve grains. 

I triumphed; but think not, reader, that therefore my suffer- 
ings were ended; nor think of me as of one sitting in a dejected 
state. Think of me as of one, even when four months had 
passed, still agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shat- 
tered- and much, perhaps, in the situation of him who has been 
racked, as I collect the torments of that state from the^affecting 
account of them left by the most innocent sufterer (of the 
time of Tames I). Meantime, I derived no benefit from any 
medicine, except one prescribed to me by an Edinburgh sur- 
geon of great eminence, namely, ammoniated tincture ot 
valerian. Medical account, therefore, of my emancipation, i 
have not much to give; and even that little, as managed by a 
man so ignorant of medicine as myself, would probably tend 
only to mislead. At all events, it would be misplaced in this 
situation. The moral of the narrative is addressed to the 
opium-eater; and, therefore, of necessity, limited m its applica- 
tion If he is taught to fear and tremble, enough has been 
effected. But he may say, that the issue of my case is at least 
a proof that opium, after a seventeen years' use, and an eight 
years' abuse of its powers, may still be renounced and that he 
may chance to bring to the task greater energy than I did or 
that with a stronger constitution than mine, he may obtain 
the same results with less. This may be true; I would not 
presume to measure the efforts of other men by my own. i 
heartily wish him more energy; I wish him the same success. 
Nevertheless, I had motives external to myself which he may 
unfortunately want; and these suppUed me with conscientious 
supports, which mere personal interests might fail to supply 
to a mind debilitated by opium. • r 1 ..^ v.o 

Teremv Taylor" conjectures that it may be as painful to be 
born as to die. I think it probable; and, during the whole 
period of diminishing the opium, I had the torments of a man 
passing out of one mode of existence into another. The issue 



T^ DE QUINCEY 

was not death, but a sort of physical regeneration, and, I may 
add, that ever since, at intervals, I have had a restoration of 
more than youthful spirits, though under the pressure of diffi- 
culties, which, in a less happy state of mind, I should have 
called misfortunes. 

One memorial of my former condition still remains; my 
dreams are not yet perfectly calm; the dread swell and agita- 
tion of the storm have not wholly subsided ; the legions that 
encamped in them are drawing off, but not all departed; my 
sleep is tumultuous, and like the gates of Paradise to our first 
parents when looking back from afar, it is still (in the tremen- 
dous line of Milton) — "With dreadful faces thronged and 
fiery arms/' 

Notes. 

* The reader of this generation will marvel at these repeated refer- 
ences to " Anastasius; " it is now an almost forgotten book, so vast 
has been the deluge of novel-writing talent, really original and pow- 
erful, which has overflowed our literature during the lapse of thirty- 
five years from the publication of these Confessions. " Anastasius " 
was written by the famous and opulent Mr. Hope; and was in 1821 a 
book both of high reputation and of great influence amongst the 
leading circles of society. 

^ A handsome news-room, of which I was very politely made free 
in passing through Manchester, by several gentlemen of that place, 
is called, I think, " The Porch; " whence I, who am a stranger in Man- 
chester, inferred that the subscribers meant to profess themselves 
followers of Zeno. But I have been since assured that this is a 
mistake. 

' I here reckon twenty-five drops of laudanum as equivalent to one 
grain of opium, which, I believe, is the common estimate. However, 
as both may be considered variable quantities (the crude opium vary- 
ing much in strength, and the tincture still more), I suppose that 
no infinitesimal accuracy can be had in such a calculation. Tea- 
spoons vary as much in size as opium in strength. Small ones hold 
about one hundred drops: so that eight thousand drops are about 
eighty times a tea-spoonful. The reader sees how much I kept 
within Dr. Buchan's indulgent allowance. 

* Between the seafaring populations on the coast of Lancashire, and 
the corresponding populations on the coast of Cumberland (such as 
Ravenglass, Whitehaven, Workington, Maryport, etc.), there was a 
slender current of interchange constantly going on, and especially in 
the days of press-gangs — in part by sea, but in part also by land. 
By the way, I may mention, as an interesting fact which I discovered 
from an almanac and itinerary, dated about the middle of Queen 
Elizabeth's reign (say, 1579), that the official route in her days for 
queen's messengers to the north of Ireland, and of course for travellers 
generally, was not (as now) through Grasmere, and thence by 
St. John's Vale, Threlkeld (for the short cut by Shoulthwaite Moss 
was then unknown), Keswick, Cockermouth, and Whitehaven. Up to 
St. Oswald's Church, Gresmere (so it was then spelled, in deference 
to its Danish original), the route lay as at present. Thence it turned 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 77 

round the lake to the left, crossed Hammerscar, up Little Langdale, 
across Wrynose to Egremont, and from Egremont to Whitehaven. 

^This, however, is not a necessary conclusion; the varieties of effect 
produced by opium on different constitutions are infinite. A London 
magistrate (Harriott's " Struggles through Life ") has recorded that 
on the first occasion of his trying laudanum for the gout, he took 
forty drops; the next night sixty, and on the fifth night eighty, without 
any effect whatever; and this at an advanced age. I have an anecdote 
from a country surgeon, however, which sinks Mr. Harriott's case 
into a trifle, and, in my projected medical treatise on opium, which I 
will publish provided the College of Surgeons will pay me for 
enlightening their benighted understandings upon this subject, I will 
relate it, but it is far too good a story to be published gratis. 

* See the common accounts in any Eastern traveller or voyager, of 
the frantic excesses committed by Malays who have taken opium, or 
are reduced to desperation by ill luck at gambling. 

* The cottage and the valley concerned in this description were not 
imaginary; the valley was the lovely one, in those days, of Grasmere; 
and the cottage was occupied for more than twenty years by myself, 
as immediate successor, in the year 1809, to Wordsworth. Looking 
to the limitation here laid down — viz., in those days — the reader will 
inquire, in what way Time can have affected the beauty of Grasrnere. 
Do the Westmoreland valleys turn gray-headed? Oh, reader! this is 
a painful memento for some of us! Thirty years ago, a gang of 
Vandals (nameless, I thank Heaven, to me), for the sake of building 
a mail-coach road that never would be wanted, carried, at a cost of 
£3,000 to the defrauded parish, a horrid causeway of sheer granite 
masonry, for three quarters 'of a mile, right through the loveliest suc- 
cession of secret forest dells and shy recesses of the lake, margined by 
unrivalled ferns, amongst which was the Osmunda regalis. This 
sequestered angle of Grasmere is described by Wordsworth, as it 
unveiled itself on a September morning, in the exquisite poems on the 
" Naming of Places." From this also — viz., this spot of ground, and 
this magnificent crest (the Osmunda) — was suggested that unique 
line — the finest independent line through all the records of verse 

" Or lady of the lake, 
Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance." 

Rightly, therefore, did I introduce this limitation. The Grasmere 
before and after this outrage were two different vales. 

* Mr. Anti-Slavery Clarkson. 

' The reader must remember what I here mean by thinking, because, 
else, this would be a very presumptuous expression. England, of 
late, has been rich to excess in fine thinkers, in the departments of 
creative and combining thought; but there is a sad dearth of mascu- 
line thinkers in any analytic path. A Scotchman of eminent name 
has lately told us, that he is obliged to quit even mathematics for 
want of encouragement. 

^°The heroine of this remarkable case was a girl about nine years 
old: and there can be little doubt that she looked down as far within 
the crater of death — that awful volcano — as any human being ever 
can have done that has lived to draw back and to report her experience. 
Not less than ninety years did she survive this memorable escape; 
and I may describe her as in all respects a woman of remarkable and 



yS DE QUINCEY 

interesting qualities. She enjoyed, throughout her long life, as the 
reader will readily infer, serene and cloudless health; had a masculine 
understanding; reverenced truth not less than did the Evangelists; 
and led a life of saintly devotion, such as might have glorified 
" Hilarion or Paul." [The words quoted are Ariosto's.] I mention 
these traits as characterizing her in a memorable extent, that the 
reader may not suppose himself relying upon a dealer in exaggera- 
tions, upon a credulous enthusiast, or upon a careless wielder of 
language. Forty-five years had intervened between the first time 
and the last time of her telling me this anecdote, and not one iota 
had shifted its ground amongst the incidents, nor had any the most 
trivial of the circumstances suffered change. The scene of the acci- 
dent was the least of valleys, what the Greeks of old would have 
called an a^tco^, and we English should properly call a dell. Human 
tenant it had none: even at noonday it was a solitude; and would 
oftentimes have been a silent solitude but for the brawling of a 
brook — not broad, but occasionally deep — which ran along the base 
of the little hills. Into this brook, probably into one of its dangerous 
pools, the child fell: and, according to the ordinary chances, she 
could have had but a slender prospect indeed of any deliverance, for, 
although a dwelling-house was close by, it was shut out from view by 
the undulations of the ground. How long the child lay in the water, 
was probably never inquired earnestly until the answer had become 
irrecoverable: for a servant, to whose care the child was then con- 
fided, had a natural interest in suppressing the whole case. From the 
child's own account, it should seem that asphyxia must have announced 
its commencement. A process of struggle and deadly suffocation was 
passed through half consciously. This process terminated by a sudden 
blow apparently on or in the brain, after which there was no pain or 
conflict; but in an instant succeeded a dazzling rush of light; imme- 
diately after which came the solemn apocalypse of the entire past life. 
Meantime, the child's disappearance in the water had happily been 
witnessed by a farmer who rented some fields in this little solitude, 
and by a rare accident was riding through them at the moment. Not 
being very well mounted, he was retarded by the hedges and other 
fences in making his way down to the water; some time was thus lost; 
but once at the spot, he leaped in, booted and spurred, and succeeded 
in delivering one that must have been as nearly counted amongst the 
populations of the grave as perhaps the laws of the shadowy world 
can suffer to return. 

" I think (but at the moment have no means of verifying my con- 
jecture) that this day was the 24th of August. On or about that day 
Charles raised the royal standard at Nottingham; which, ominously 
enough (considering the strength of such superstitions in the seven- 
teenth century, and, amongst the generations of that century, more 
especially in this particular generation of the Parliamentary War), was 
blown down during the succeeding night. Let me remark, in passing, 
that no falsehood can virtually be greater or more malicious, than that 
which imputes to Archbishop Laud a special or exceptional faith in 
such mute warnings. 

"What poet? It was Wordsworth; and why did I not formally 
name him? This throws a light backwards upon the strange history 
of Wordsworth's reputation. The year in which I wrote and pub- 
lished these Confessions was 1821; and at that time the name of 
Wordsworth, though beginning to emerge from the dark cloud of 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 79 

scorn and contumely which had hitherto overshadowed it, was yet 
most imperfectly established. Not until ten years later was his great- 
ness cheerfully and generally acknowledged. I, therefore, as the very 
earliest (wiJ:hout one exception) of all who came forward, in the 
beginning of his career, to honor and welcome him, shrank with dis- 
gust from making any sentence of mine the occasion for an explosion 
of vulgar malice against him. But the grandeur of the passage here 
cited inevitably spoke for itself; and he that would have been most 
scornful on hearing the name of the poet coupled with this epithet 
of " great," could not but find his malice intercepted, and himself 
cheated into cordial admiration, by the splendor of the verses. 

"William Lithgow; his book is ill and pedantically written; but the 
account of his own sufferings on the rack at Malaga is overpoweringly 
afifecting, 

" In all former editions, I had ascribed this sentiment to Jeremy 
Taylor. On a close search, however, wishing to verify the quotation, 
it appeared that I had been mistaken. Something very like it occurs 
more than once in the bishop's voluminous writings; but the exact 
passage moving in my mind had evidently been this which follows, 
from Lord Bacon's "Essay on Death:" "It is as natural to die as 
to be born; and to a little infant perhaps the one is as painful as the 
other." 



APPENDIX 

THE proprietors of this little work having determined on 
reprinting it, some explanation seems called for, to 
account for the non-appearance of a Third Part, prom- 
ised in the London Magazine of December last; and 
the more so, because the proprietors, under whose guarantee 
that promise was issued, might otherwise be implicated 
in the blame — little or much — attached to its non-fulfil- 
ment. This blame, in mere justice, the author takes wholly 
upon himself. What may be the exact amount of the guilt 
which he thus appropriates, is a very dark question to his 
own judgment, and not much illuminated by any of the 
masters on casuistry whom he has consulted on the occa- 
sion. On the one hand, it seems generally agreed that 
a promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers 
to whom it is made: for which reason it is that we 
see many persons break promises without scruple that are 
made to a whole nation, who keep their faith reHgiously in 
all private engagements, — breaches of promise towards the 
stronger party being committed at a man's own peril; on the 
other hand, the only parties interested in the promises of an 
author are his readers, and these it is a point of modesty in 
any author to believe as few as possible; or perhaps only one, 
in which case any promise imposes a sanctity of moral obliga- 
tion which it is shocking to think of. Casuistry dismissed, 
however, — the author throws himself on the indulgent con- 
sideration of all who may conceive themselves aggrieved by 
his delay, in the following account of his own condition from 
the end of last year, when the engagement was made, up 
nearly to the present time. For any purpose of self-excuse, 
it might be sufficient to say, that intolerable bodily suffering 
had totally disabled him for almost any exertion of mind, 
more especially for such as demand and presuppose a pleasur- 
able and a genial state of feehng; but, as a case that may by 
possibility contribute a trifle to the medical history of opium 
in a further stage of its action than can often have been 
brought under the notice of professional men, he has judged 
that it might be acceptable to some readers to have it 

80 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 8 1 

described more at length. Fiat in experimentum corpore vili, 
is a just rule where there is any reasonable presumption of 
benefit to arise on a large scale. What the benefit may be, 
will admit of a doubt; but there can be none as to the value of 
the body, for a more worthless body than his own, the author 
is free to confess, cannot be. It is his pride to beUeve, that 
it is the very ideal of a base, crazy, despicable human system, 
that hardly 'ever could have been meant to be seaworthy for 
two days under the ordinary storms and wear-and-tear of Hfe ; 
and, indeed, if that were the creditable way of disposing of 
human bodies, he must own that he should almost be ashamed 
to bequeath his wretched structure to any respectable dog. 
But now to the case, which, for the sake of avoiding the con- 
stant recurrence of a cumbersome periphrasis, the author will 
take the liberty of giving in the first person. 

Those who have read the Confessions will have closed them 
with the impression that I had wholly renounced the use of 
opium. This impression I meant to convey, and that for two 
reasons: first, because the very act of deliberately recording 
such a state of suffering necessarily presumes in the recorder 
a power of surveying his own case as a cool spectator, and a 
degree of spirits for adeqiiately describing it, which it would 
be inconsistent to suppose in any person speaking from the 
station of an actual sufferer; secondly, because I, who had 
descended from so large a quantity as eight thousand drops 
to so small a one (comparatively speaking) as a quantity rang- 
ing between three hundred and one hundred and sixty drops, 
might well suppose that the victory was in effect achieved. 
In suffering my readers, therefore, to think of me as of a 
reformed opium-eater, I left no impression but what I shared 
myself, and, as may be seen, even this impression was left to 
be collected from the general tone of the conclusion, and not 
from any specific words, which are in no instance at variance 
with the literal truth. In no long time after that paper was 
written, I became sensible that the effort which remained 
would cost me far more energy than I had anticipated, and 
the necessity for making it was more apparent every month. 
In particular, I became aware of an increasing callousness or 
defect of sensibility in the stomach : and this I imagined might 
imply a scirrhous state of that organ either formed or forming. 
An eminent physician, to whose kindness I was, at that time, 
deeply indebted, informed me that such a termination of my 
case was not impossible, though likely to be forestalled by a 
different termination, in the event of my continuing the use of 



82 DE QUINCEY 

opium. Opium, therefore, I resolved wholly to abjure, as 
soon as I should find myself at liberty to bend my undivided 
attention and energy to this purpose. It was not, however, 
until the 24th of June last that any tolerable concurrence of 
facilities for such an attempt arrived. On that day I began 
my experiment, having previously settled in my own mind 
that I would not flinch, but would *' stand up to the scratch," 
under any possible " punishment." I must premise, that 
about one hundred and seventy or one hundred and eighty 
drops had been my ordinary allowance for many months. 
Occasionally I had run up as high as five hundred, and once 
nearly to seven hundred. In repeated preludes to my final 
experiment I had also gone as low as one hundred drops, 
but had found it impossible to stand it beyond the fourth day, 
which, by the way, I have always found more difficult to get 
over than any of the preceding three. I went off under easy 
sail — one hundred and thirty drops a day for three days ; on 
the fourth I plunged at once to eighty. The misery which I 
now suffered "took the conceit " out of me, at once ; and for 
about a month I continued off and on about this mark ; then I 
sunk to sixty, and the next day to — none at all. This was 
the first day for nearly ten years that I had existed without 
opium. I persevered in my abstinence for ninety hours; that 

is, upwards of half a week. Then I took ask me not 

how much; say, ye severest, what would ye have done? Then 
I abstained again; then took about twenty-five drops; then 
abstained; and so on. 

Meantime, the symptoms which attended my case for the 
first six weeks of the experiment were these: enormous irri- 
tability and excitement of the whole system; the stomach, in 
particular, restored to a full feeling of vitality and sensibility, 
but often in great pain; unceasing restlessness night and day; 
sleep — I scarcely knew what it was — three hours out of the 
twenty-four was the utmost I had, and that so agitated and 
shallow that I heard every sound that was near me; lower jaw 
constantly swelling; mouth ulcerated; and many other distress- 
ing symptoms that would be tedious to repeat, amongst which, 
however, I must mention one, because it had never failed to 
accompany any attempt to renounce opium, — namely, violent 
sternutation. This now became exceedingly troublesome; 
sometimes lasting for two hours at once, and recurring at least 
twice or three times a day. I was not much surprised at this, 
on recollecting what I had somewhere heard or read, that the 
membrane which lines the nostrils is a prolongation of that 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 83 

which lines the stomach; whence, I beHeve, are explained the 
inflammatory appearances about the nostrils of dram-drinkers. 
The sudden restoration of its original sensibility to the stomach 
expressed itself, I suppose, in this way. It is remarkable, also, 
that, during the whole period of years through which I had 
taken opium, I had never once caught cold (as the phrase is), 
nor even the slightest cough. But now a violent cold attacked 
me, and a cough soon after. In an unfinished fragment of a 

letter begun about this time to , I find these words: — 

" You ask me to write the . Do you know Beau- 
mont and Fletcher's play of "Thierry and Theodoret"? There 
you will see my case as to sleep ; nor is it much of an exaggera- 
tion in other features. I protest to you that I have a greater 
influx of thoughts in one hour at present than in a whole year 
under the reign of opium. It seems as though all the thoughts 
which had been frozen up for a decade of years by opium had 
now, according to the old fable, been thawed at once, such a 
multitude stream in upon me from all quarters. Yet such is 
my impatience and hideous irritability, that, for one which I 
detain and write down, fifty escape me. In spite of my weari- 
ness and sufferings and want of sleep, I cannot stand still or sit 
for two minutes together.' * I nunc, et versus tecum meditare 
canoros.' " 

At this stage of my experiment I sent to a neighboring 
surgeon, requesting that he would come over to see me. In 
the evening he came, and after briefly stating the case to him, 
I asked this question : Whether he did not think that the opium 
might have acted as a stimulus to the digestive organs; and 
that the present state of suffering in the stomach, which mani- 
festly was the cause of the inability to sleep, might arise from 
indigestion? His answer was, — No: on the contrary, he 
thought that the suffering was caused by digestion itself, which 
should naturally go on below the consciousness, but which, 
from the unnatural state of the stomach, vitiated by so long a 
use of opium, was become distinctly perceptible. This opinion 
was plausible, and the unintermitting nature of the suffering 
disposes me to think that it was true; for, if it had been any 
mere irregular affection of the stomach, it should naturally 
have intermitted occasionally, and constantly fluctuated as to 
degree. The intention of nature, as manifested in the healthy 
state, obviously is, to withdraw from our notice all the vital 
motions, such as the circulation of the blood, the expansion 
and contraction of the lungs, the peristaltic action of the 
stomach, etc.; and opium, it seems, is able in this, as in other 



84 DE QUINCEY 

instances, to counteract her purposes. By the advice of the 
surgeon, I tried bitters. For a short time these greatly miti- 
gated the feeHngs under which I labored ; but about the forty- 
second day of the experiment the symptoms already noticed 
began to retire, and new ones to arise of a different and far 
more tormenting class; under these, with but a few intervals 
of remission, I have since continued to sufifer. But I dismiss 
them undescribed for two reasons; first, because the mind re- 
volts from retracing circumstantially any sufferings from 
which it is removed by too short or by no interval. To do this 
with minuteness enough to make the review of any use, would 
be indeed " infandum renovare dolorem," and possibly without 
a sufficient motive: for, secondly, I doubt whether this latter 
state be any way referable to opium, positively considered, or 
even negatively; that is, whether it is to be numbered amongst 
the last evils from the direct action of opium, or even amongst 
the earliest evils consequent upon a want of opium in a system 
long deranged by its use. Certainly one part of the symptoms 
might be accounted for from the time of year (August); for 
though the summer was not a hot one, yet in any case the sum 
of all the heat funded (if one may say so) during the previous 
month, naturally renders August in its better half the hottest 
part of the year; and it so happened that the excessive perspira- 
tion, which even at Christmas attends any great reduction in 
the daily quantum of opium, and which in July was so violent 
as to oblige me to use a bath five or six times a day, had about 
the setting in of the hottest season wholly retired, on which 
account any bad effect of the heat might be the more unmiti- 
gated. Another symptom, namely, what in my ignorance I 
call internal rheumatism (sometimes affecting the shoulders, 
etc., but more often appearing to be seated in the stomach), 
seemed again less probably attributable to the opium, or the 
want of opium, than to the dampness of the house^ which I 
inhabit, which had about that time attained its maximum, July 
having been, as usual, a month of incessant rain in our most 
rainy part of England. 

Under these reasons for doubting whether opium had any 
connection with the latter stage of my bodily wretchedness — 
(except, indeed, as an occasional cause, as having left the body 
weaker and more crazy, and thus predisposed to any mal-influ- 
ence whatever), — I willingly spare my reader all description 
of it: let it perish to him; and would that I could as easily say, 
let it perish to my own remembrances, that any future hours of 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 85 

tranquility may not be disturbed by too vivid an ideal of pos- 
sible human misery! 

So much for the sequel of my experiment; as to the former 
stage, in which properly lies the experiment and its apphcation 
to other cases, I must request my reader not to forget the rea- 
sons for which I have recorded it. These were two. First, a 
belief that I might add some trifle to the history of opmm as a 
medical agent; in this I am aware that I have not at all fulfilled 
my own intentions, in consequence of the torpor of mind, pani 
of body, and extreme disgust to the subject, which besieged me 
whilst writing that part of my paper; which part being immedi- 
ately sent off to the press (distant about five degrees of lati- 
tude), cannot be corrected or improved. But from this ac- 
count, rambling as it may be, it is evident that thus much of 
benefit may arise to the persons most interested in such a his- 
tory of opium, — namely, to opium-eaters in general, — that it 
establishes, for their consolation and encouragement, the fact 
that opium may be renounced, and without greater sufferings 
than an ordinary resolution may support; and by a pretty rapid 
course^ of descent. 

To communicate this result of my experiment, was my fore- 
most purpose. Secondly, as a purpose collateral to this I 
wished to explain how it had become impossible for me to 
compose a Third Part in time to accompany this republication: 
for during the very time of this experiment, the proof-sheets 
of this reprint were sent to me from London; and such was 
my inability to expand or to improve them, that I could not 
even bear to read them over with attention enough to notice 
the press errors, or to correct any verbal inaccuracies. These 
were my reasons for troubling my reader with any record, long 
or short, of experiments relating to so truly base a subject as 
my own body; and I am earnest with the reader, that he will 
not forget them, or so far misapprehend me as to believe it 
possible that I would condescend to so rascally a subject for 
its own sake, or, indeed, for any less object than that of gen- 
eral benefit to others. Such an animal as the self-observing 
valetudinarian, I know there is. I have met him myself occa- 
sionally, and I know that he is the worst imaginable 
heautontimoroumenos; aggravating and sustaining, by calling 
into distinct consciousness, every symptom that would else, 
perhaps, under a different direction given to the ^ thoughts, 
become evanescent. But as to myself, so profound is my con- 
tempt for this undignified and selfish habit, that I could as 
little condescend to it as I could to spend my time in watching 



86 DE QUINCEY 

a poor servant-girl, to whom at this moment I hear some lad 
or other making love at the back of my house. Is it for a 
Transcendental philosopher to feel any curiosity on such an 
occasion? Or can I, whose life is worth only eight and a half 
years' purchase, be supposed to have leisure for such trivial 
employments? However, to put this out of question, I shall 
say one thing which will, perhaps, shock some readers; but 
I am sure it ought not to do so, considering the motives on 
which I say it. No man, I suppose, employs much of his time 
on the phenomena of his own body without some regard for 
it; whereas the reader sees that, so far from looking upon 
mine with any complacency or regard, I hate it and make it 
the object of my bitter ridicule and contempt; and I should 
not be displeased to know that the last indignities which the 
law inflicts upon the bodies of the worst malefactors might 
hereafter fall upon it. And in testification of my sincerity in 
saying this, I shall make the following offer. Like other 
men, I have particular fancies about the place of my burial; 
having lived chiefly in a mountainous region, I rather cleave 
to the conceit that a grave in a green church-yard amongst 
the ancient and solitary hills will be a sublimer and more tran- 
quil place of repose for a philosopher than any in the hideous 
Golgothas of London. Yet, if the gentlemen of Surgeons' 
Hall think that any benefit can redound to their science from 
inspecting the appearances in the body of an opium-eater, 
let them speak but a word, and I will take care that mine shall 
be legally secured to them — that is, as soon as I have done 
with it myself. Let them not hesitate to express their wishes 
upon any scruples of false delicacy and consideration for my 
feelings; I assure them that they will do me too much honor 
by " demonstrating " on such a crazy body as mine ; and it 
will give me pleasure to anticipate this posthumous revenge 
and insult inflicted upon that which has caused me so much 
suffering in this life. Such bequests are not common; rever- 
sionary benefits contingent upon the death of the testator are 
indeed dangerous to announce in many cases. Of this we 
have a remarkable instance in the habits of a Roman prince, 
who used, upon any notification made to him by rich persons, 
that they had left him a handsome estate in their wills, to 
express his entire satisfaction at such arrangements, and his 
gracious acceptance of those royal legacies; but then, if the 
testators neglected to give him immediate possession of the 
property, — if they traitorously ** persisted in living " (si vivere 
perseverant, as Suetonius expresses it), he was highly pro- 



CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 



87 



voked, and took his measures accordingly. In those times, 
and from one of the worst of the Caesars, we might expect such 
conduct; but I am sure that, from Enghsh surgeons at this 
day, I need look for no expressions of impatience, or of any 
other feelings but such as are answerable to that pure love of 
science, and all its interests, which induces me to make such 
an ofifer. 

September 30th, 1822. , 

Notes 

^ In saying this, I meant no disrespect to the individual house, as 
the reader will understand when I tell him that, with the exception of 
one or two princely mansions, and some few inferior ones that have 
been coated with Roman cement, I am not acquainted with any house 
in this mountainous district which is wholly water-proof. The archi- 
tecture of books, I flatter myself, is conducted on just principles in 
this country; but for any other architecture, it is in a barbarous state, 
and, what is worse, in a retrograde state. 

* On which last notice I would remark that mine was too rapid, 
and the suffering therefore needlessly aggravated; or rather, perhaps, 
it was not sufficiently continuous and equably graduated. But, that 
the reader may judge for himself, and, above all, that the opium-eater, 
who is preparing to retire from business, may have every sort of 
information before him, I subjoin my diary. 



FIRST 

Monday, June 24. . . 


WEEK. 

Drops of Laud. 
130 


SECOND 


WEEK. 

Drops of Laud. 


" 25... 


140 


" 2 




80 


" 26.. 


130 


" 3.... 




90 


" 27... 


80 

80 


" 4 




100 


" 28.. 


" 5 




80 


" 29... 


80 


" 6 




80 


" 30... 


80 


" 7 




«n 


THIRD WEEK. 

Drops of Laud. 
Monday, July 8 300 


FOURTH 

Monday, July 15. . . . 


WEEK. 

Drops of Laud 

7fi 


9... 


50 


" 16.... 
" 17.... 
" 18 . 




.... 731^ 
.... 73>& 
70 


" ni 


Hiatus in 
manuscript. 

76 


" 13 ; 


" 19.... 

" 20.... 





.... 240 
.... 80 


" u... 


" 21.... 




.... 350 




k'Lb'Tn 
Monday, July 32 


WEEK. 

Drops of Laud. 
60 








" 23 


none 






" 24 


none 






•» 25 


none 






" 26 .... 


200 






** 27 


none 





88 DE QUINCEY 

What mean these abrupt relapses, the reader will ask, perhaps, to such 
numbers as 300, 350, etc.? The impulse to these relapses was mere 
infirmity of purpose; the motive, where any motive blended with this 
impulse, was either the principle of " reculer pour mieus sauter " — (for 
under the torpor of a large dose, which lasted for a day or two, a less 
quantity satisfied the stomach, which, on awaking, found itself partly 
accustomed to this new ration), — or else it was this principle — that 
of sufferings otherwise equal, those will be borne best which meet 
with a mood of anger; now, whenever I ascended to any large dose, 
I was furiously incensed on the following day, and could then have 
borne anything. 



suspiria.de profundis 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 

A SEQUEL TO THE 

"CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER" 



INTRODUCTION 



IN 1 82 1, as a contribution to a periodical work, — in 1822, as 
a separate volume, — appeared the " Confessions of an Eng- 
lish Opium-Eater." The object of that work was to reveal 
something of the grandeur which belongs potentially to 
human dreams. Whatever may be the number of those in whom 
this faculty of dreaming splendidly can be supposed to lurk, 
there are not perhaps very many in whom it is developed. He 
whose talk is of oxen, will probably dream of oxen, and the 
condition of human life, which yokes so vast a majority to a 
daily experience incompatible with much elevation of thought, 
oftentimes neutralizes the tone of grandeur in the reproductive 
faculty of dreaming, even for those whose minds are populous 
with solemn imagery. Habitually to dream magnificently, a 
man must have a constitutional determination to reverie. 
This in the first place, and even this, where it exists strongly 
is too much liable to disturbance from the gathering agitation 
of our present English life. Already, in this year 1845, what 
by the procession through fifty years of mighty revolutions 
amongst the kingdoms of the earth, what by the continual 
development of vast physical agencies, — steam in all its appli- 
cations, light getting under harness as a slave for man, powers 
from heaven descending upon education and accelerations of 
the press, powers from hell (as it might seem, but these also 
celestial) coming round upon artillery and the forces of 
destruction, — the eye of the calmest observer is troubled; the 

91 



92 DE QUINCEY 

brain is haunted as if by some jealousy of ghostly beings 
moving amongst us; and it becomes too evident that, unless 
this colossal pace of advance can be retarded (a thing not to 
be expected), or, which is happily more probable, can be met 
by counter forces of corresponding magnitude, forces in the 
direction of religion or profound philosophy, that shall radiate 
centrifugally against this storm of Hfe so perilously centripetal 
towards the vortex of the merely human, left to itself, the 
natural tendency of so chaotic a tumult must be to evil; for 
some minds to lunacy; for others to a reagency of fleshy tor- 
por. How much this fierce condition of eternal hurry upon 
an arena too exclusively human in its interests is likely to 
defeat the grandeur which is latent in all men, may be seen in 
the ordinary effect from living too constantly in varied com- 
pany. The word dissipation, in one of its uses, expresses that 
effect; the action of thought and feeHng is too much dissipated 
and squandered. To reconcentrate them into meditative hab- 
its, a necessity is felt by all observing persons for sometimes 
retiring from crowds. No man ever will unfold the capacities 
of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with 
solitude. How much solitude, so much power. Or, if not 
true in that rigor of expression, to this formula undoubtedly 
it is that the wise rule of life must approximate. 

Among the powers in man which suffer by this too intense 
life of the social instincts, none suffers more than the power 
of dreaming. Let no man think this a trifle. The machinery 
for dreaming planted in the human brain was not planted 
for nothing. That faculty, in alliance with the mystery of 
darkness, is the one great tube through which man communi- 
cates with the shadowy. And the dreaming organ, in con- 
nection with the heart, the eye and the ear, compose the mag- 
nificent apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers 
of a human brain, and throws dark reflections from eternities 
below all life upon the mirrors of the sleeping mind. 

But if this faculty suffers from the decay of solitude, 
which is becoming a visionary idea in England, on the other 
hand, it is certain that some merely physical agencies can 
and do assist the faculty of dreaming almost preternaturally. 
Amongst these is intense exercise; to some extent at least, and 
for some persons; but beyond all others is opium, which indeed 
seems to possess a specific power in that direction; not merely 
for exalting the colors of dream-scenery, but for deepening 
its shadows, and, above all, for strengthening the sense of its 
fearful realities. 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 93 

The Opium Confessions were written with some slight sec- 
ondary purpose of exposing this specific power of opium upon 
the faculty of dreaming, but much more with the purpose of 
displaying the faculty itself; and the outline of the work trav- 
elled in this course. Supposing a reader acquainted with the 
true object of the Confessions as here stated, namely, the 
revelation of dreaming, to have put this question: 

" But how came you to dream more splendidly than others? " 

The answer would have been — 

" Because (prsemissis prsemittendis) I took excessive quan- 
tities of opium." 

Secondly, suppose him to say, " But how came you to take 
opium in this excess? " 

The answer to that would be, " Because some early events in 
my life had left a weakness in one organ which required (or 
seemed to require) that stimulant." 

Then, because the opium dreams could not always have 
been understood without a knowledge of these events, it 
became necessary to relate them. Now, these two questions 
and answers exhibit the law of the work; that is, the principle 
which determined its form, but precisely in the inverse or 
regressive order. The work itself opened with the narration 
of my early adventures. These, in the natural order of suc- 
cession, led to the opium as a resource for heaHng their con- 
sequences; and the opium as naturally led to the dreams. But 
in the synthetic order of presenting the facts, what stood last 
in the succession of development stood first in the order of my 
purposes. 

At the close of this little work, the reader was instructed to 
believe, and truly instructed, that I had mastered the tyranny 
of opium. The fact is, that twice I mastered it, and by efforts 
even more prodigious in the second of these cases than in the 
first. But one error I committed in both. I did not connect 
with the abstinence from opium, so trying to the fortitude 
under any circumstances, that enormity of excess which (as I 
have since learned) is the one sole resource for making it 
endurable. I overlooked, in those days, the one sine qua non 
for making the triumph permanent. Twice I sank, twice I 
rose again. A third time I sank; partly from the cause men- 
tioned (the oversight as to exercise), partly from other causes, 
on which it avails not now to trouble the reader. I could 
moralize, if I chose; and perhaps he will moralize, whether I 
choose it or not. But, in the m.eantime, neither of us is 
acquainted properly with the circumstances of the case : I, from 



94 DE QUINCEY 

natural bias of judgment, not altogether acquainted; and he 
(with his permission) not at all. 

During this third prostration before the dark idol, and after 
some years, new and monstrous phenomena began slowly to 
arise. For a time, these were neglected as accidents, or palli- 
ated by such remedies as I knew of. But when I could no 
longer conceal from myself that these dreadful symptoms were 
moving forward forever, by a pace steadily, solemnly, and 
equably increasing, I endeavored, with some feeling of panic, 
for a third time to retrace my steps. But I had not reversed 
my motions for many weeks, before I became profoundly 
aware that this was impossible. Or, in the imagery of my 
dreams, which translated everything into their own language, 
I saw through vast avenues of gloom those towering gates of 
ingress which hitherto had always seemed to stand open, now 
at last barred against my retreat, and hung with funeral crape. 

As applicable to this tremendous situation (the situation of 
one escaping by some refluent current from the maelstrom 
roaring for him in the distance, who finds suddenly that this 
current is but an eddy, wheeling round upon the same mael- 
strom), I have since remembered a striking incident in a mod- 
ern novel. A lady abbess of a convent, herself suspected of 
Protestant leanings, and in that way already disarmed of all 
effectual power, finds one of her own nuns (whom she knows 
to be innocent) accused of an offence leading to the most ter- 
rific of punishments. The nun will be immured alive if she 
is found guilty; and there is no chance that she will not, for 
the evidence against her is strong, unless something were 
made known that cannot be made known; and the judges are 
hostile. All follows in the order of the reader's fears. The 
witnesses depose; the evidence is without effectual contradic- 
tion; the conviction is declared; the judgment is delivered; 
nothing remains but to see execution done. At this crisis, the 
abbess, alarmed too late for effectual interposition, considers 
with herself that, according to the regular forms, there will 
be one single night open, during which the prisoner cannot 
be withdrawn from her own separate jurisdiction. This one 
night, therefore, she will use, at any hazard to herself, for the 
salvation of her friend. At midnight, when all is hushed in the 
convent, the lady traverses the passages which lead to the cells 
of prisoners. She bears a master-key under her professional 
habit. As this will open every door in every corridor, already, 
by anticipation, she feels the luxury of holding her emancipated 
friend within her arms. Suddenly she has reached the door; 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 95 

she descries a dusky object; she raises her lamp, and, ranged 
within the recess of the entrance, she beholds the funeral ban- 
ner of the holy office, and the black robes of its inexorable 
officials. 

I apprehend that, in a situation such as this, supposing it a 
real one, the lady abbess would not start, would not show any 
marks externally of consternation or horror. The case was 
beyond that. The sentiment which attends the sudden reve- 
lation that all is lost silently is gathered up into the heart; it is 
too deep for gestures or for words; and no part of it passes to 
the outside. Were the ruin conditional, or were it in any point 
doubtful, it would be natural to utter ejaculations, and to seek 
sympathy. But where the ruin is understood to be absolute, 
where sympathy cannot be consolation, and counsel cannot be 
hope that is otherwise. The voice perishes; the gestures are 
frozen ; and the spirit of man flies back upon its own centre. 
I, at least, upon seeing those awful gates closed and hung with 
draperies of woe, as for a death already past, spoke not, nor 
started, nor groaned. One profound sigh ascended from my 
heart, and I was silent for days. 

It is the record of this third or final stage of opium, as one 
differing in something more than degree from the others, that 
I am now undertaking. But a scruple arises as to the true 
interpretation of these final symptoms. I have elsewhere 
explained, that it was no particular purpose of mine, and why 
it was no particular purpose, to warn other opium-eaters. 
Still, as some few persons may use the record in that way, it 
becomes a matter of interest to ascertain how far it is likely, 
that, even with the same excesses, other opium-eaters could 
fall into the same condition. I do not mean to lay a stress upon 
any supposed idiosyncrasy in myself. Possibly every man has 
an idiosyncrasy. In some things, undoubtedly, he has. For no 
man ever yet resembled another man so far, as not to differ 
from him in features innumerable of his inner nature. But 
what I point to are not pecuHarities of temperament or of 
organization, so much as peculiar circumstances and incidents 
through which my own separate experience had revolved. 
Some of these were of a nature to alter the whole economy of 
my mind. Great convulsions, from whatever cause, — from 
conscience, from fear, from grief, from struggles of the will, — 
sometimes, in passing away themselves, do not carry off the 
changes which they have worked. All the agitations of this 
magnitude which a man may have threaded in his life, he 
neither ought to report, nor could report. But one which 



96 DE QUINCEY 

affected my childhood is a privileged exception. It is privi- 
leged as a proper communication for a stranger's ear; because, 
though relating to a man's proper self, it is a self so far removed 
from his present self as to wound no feelings of delicacy or 
just reserve. It is privileged, also, as a proper subject for the 
sympathy of the narrator. An adult sympathizes with himself 
in childhood because he is the same, and because (being the 
same) yet he is not the same. He acknowledges the deep, 
mysterious identity between himself, as adult and as infant, 
for the ground of his sympathy; and yet, with this general 
agreement, and necessity of agreement, he feels the differences 
between his two selves as the main quickeners of his sympathy. 
He pities the infirmities, as they arise to light in his young 
forerunner, which now, perhaps, he does not share; he looks 
indulgently upon the errors of the understanding, or Hmita- 
tions of view which now he has long survived ; and sometimes, 
also, he honors in the infant that rectitude of will which, under 
some temptations, he may since have felt it so difficult to 
maintain. 

The particular case to which I refer in my own childhood 
was one of intolerable grief; a trial, in fact, more severe than 
many people at any age are called upon to stand. The relation 
in which the case stands to my latter opium experience is 
this: Those vast clouds of gloomy grandeur which overhung 
my dreams at all stages of opium, but which grew into the 
darkest of miseries in the last, and that haunting of the human 
face, which latterly towered into a curse, — were ^ they not 
partly derived from this childish experience? It is certain 
that, from the essential solitude in which my childhood was 
passed; from the depth of my sensibility; from the exaltation 
of this by the resistance of an intellect too prematurely devel- 
oped; it resulted that the terrific grief which I passed through 
drove a shaft for me into the worlds of death and darkness 
which never again closed, and through which it might be said 
that I ascended and descended at will, according to the temper 
of my spirits. Some of the phenomena developed in my 
dream-scenery, undoubtedly, do but repeat the experiences of 
childhood; and others seem Hkely to have been growths and 
fructifications from seeds at that time sown. 

The reasons, therefore, for prefixing some account of a 
" passage " in childhood to this record of a dreadful visitation 
from opium excesses are, first. That, in coloring, it harmon- 
izes with that record, and, therefore, is related to it at least in 
point of feeling; secondly, That, possibly, it was in part the 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 97 

origin of some features in that record, and so far is related to 
it in logic; thirdly, That, the final assault of opium being of a 
nature to challenge the attention of medical men, it is import- 
ant to clear away all doubts and scruples which can gather 
about the roots of such a malady. Was it opium, or was it 
opium in combination with something else, that raised these 
storms? 

Some cynical reader will object, that for this last purpose 
it would have been sufficient to state the fact, without rehears- 
ing in extenso the particulars of that case in childhood. But 
the reader of more kindness (for a surly reader is always a bad 
critic) will also have more discernment; and he will perceive 
that it is not for the mere facts that the case is reported, but 
because these facts move through a wilderness of natural 
thoughts or feelings: some in the child who suffers; some in 
the man who reports; but all so far interesting as they relate 
to solemn objects. Meantime, the objection of the sullen critic 
reminds me of a scene sometimes beheld at the EngHsh lakes. 
Figure to yourself an energetic tourist, who protests every- 
where that he comes only to see the lakes. He has no busi- 
ness whatever; he is not searching for any recreant indorser of 
a bill, but simply in search .of the picturesque. Yet this man 
adjures every landlord, ** by the virtue of his oath," to tell him, 
and, as he hopes for peace in this world, to tell him truly, which 
is the nearest road to Keswick. Next, he applies to the pos- 
tilions, — the Westmoreland postilions always fly down hills 
at full stretch without locking, — but, nevertheless, in the full 
career of their fiery race, our picturesque man lets down the 
glasses, pulls up four horses and two postilions, at the risk of 
six necks and twenty legs, adjuring them to reveal whether 
they are taking the shortest road. Finally, he descries my 
unworthy self upon the road ; and, instantly stopping his flying 
equipage, he demands of me (as one whom he believes to be a 
scholar and a man of honor) whether there is not, in the possi- 
bility of things, a shorter cut to Keswick. Now, the answer 
which rises to the lips of landlord, two postilions, and myself, 
is this : '' Most excellent stranger, as you come to the lakes 
simply to see their loveliness, might it not be as well to ask 
after the most beautiful road, rather than the shortest? 
Because, if abstract shortness, if rd brevity, is your object, then 
the shortest of all possible tours would seem, with submission, 
never to have left London." On the same principle, I tell my 
critic that the whole course of this narrative resembles, and 
was meant to resemble, a caduceus wreathed about with mean- 



98 DE QUINCEY 

dering ornaments, or the shaft of a tree's stem hung round and 
surmounted with some vagrant parasitical plant. The mere 
medical subject of the opium answers to the dry, withered pole, 
which shoots all the rings of the flowering plants, and seems 
to do so by some dexterity of its own; whereas, in fact, the 
plant and its tendrils have curled round the sullen cyHnder by 
mere luxuriance of theirs. Just as in Cheapside, if you look 
right and left, the streets so narrow, that lead off at right 
angles, seem quarried and blasted out of some Babylonian 
brick-kiln; bored, not raised artificially by the builder's hand. 
But, if you inquire of the worthy men who live in that neigh- 
borhood, you will find it unanimously deposed — that not the 
streets were quarried out of the bricks, but, on the contrary 
(most ridiculous as it seems), that the bricks have supervened 
upon the streets. 

The streets did not intrude amongst the bricks, but those 
cursed bricks came to imprison the streets. So, also, the ugly 
pole — hop-pole, vine-pole, espalier, no matter what — is there 
only for support. Not the flowers are for the pole, but the 
pole is for the flowers. Upon the same analogy, view me as 
one (in the words of a true and most impassioned poet)^ 
" viridantem floribus hastas " — making verdant, and gay with 
the life of flowers, murderous spears and halberts — things 
that express death in their origin (being made from dead sub- 
stances that once had lived in forests), things that express ruin 
in their use. The true object in my '* Opium Confessions " is 
not the naked physiological theme, — on the contrary, that is 
the ugly pole, the murderous spear, the halbert, — but those 
wandering musical variations upon the theme, — those para- 
sitical thoughts, feelings, digressions, which climb up with 
bells and blossoms round about the arid stock; ramble away 
from it at times with perhaps too rank a luxuriance ; but at the 
same time, by the eternal interest attached to the subjects of 
these digressions, no matter what were the execution, spread 
a glory over incidents that for themselves would be — less 
than nothing. 

Note. 

^Caius Valerius Flaccus. 



II 



THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD 

IT is so painful to a lover of open-hearted sincerity that any 
indirect traits of vanity should even seem to creep into 
records of profound passion ; and yet, on the other hand, it 
is so impossible, without an unnatural restraint upon the 
freedom of the narrative, to prevent oblique gleams reaching 
the reader from such circumstances of luxury or elegance as 
did really surround my childhood, that on all accounts I think it 
better to tell him, from the first, with the simplicity of truth, in 
what order of society my family moved at the time from which 
this preliminary narrative is dated. Otherwise it would happen 
that, merely by moving truly and faithfully through the cir- 
cumstances of this early experience, I could hardly prevent the 
reader from receiving an impression as of some higher rank 
than did really belong to my family. My father was a mer- 
chant; not in the sense of Scotland, where it means a man who 
sells groceries in a cellar, but in the English sense, a sense 
severely exclusive — namely, he was a man engaged in foreign 
commerce,and no other; therefore, in wholesale commerce, and 
no other — which last circumstance it is important to mention 
because it brings him within the benefit of Cicero's condescend- 
ing distinction^ — as one to be despised certainly, but not too 
intensely to be despised even by a Roman senator. He — 
this imperfectly despicable man — died at an early age, and 
very soon after the incidents here recorded, leaving to his 
family, then consisting of a wife and six children, an unburth- 
ened estate producing exactly £1600 a year. Naturally, there- 
fore, at the date of my narrative, — if narrative it can be 
called, — he had an income still larger, from the addition of 
current commercial profits. Now, to any man who is 
acquainted with commercial life, but, above all, with such life 
in England, it will readily occur that in an opulent English 
family of that class, — opulent, though not rich in a mercan- 
tile estimate, — the domestic economy is likely to be upon a 
scale of liberality altogether unknown amongst the correspond- 
ing orders in foreign nations. Whether as to the establish- 

99 



lOO DE QUINCEY 

ment of servants, or as to the provision made for the comfort 
of all its members, such a household not uncommonly eclipses 
the scale of living even amongst the poorer classes of our 
nobility, though the most splendid in Europe — a fact which, 
since the period of my infancy, I have had many personal 
opportunities for verifying both in England and in Ireland. 
From this peculiar anomaly, affecting the domestic economy of 
merchants, there arises a disturbance upon the general scale 
of outward signs by which we measure the relations of rank. 
The equation, so to speak, between one order of society and 
another, which usually travels in the natural line of their com- 
parative expenditure, is here interrupted and defeated, so 
that one rank would be collected from the name of the occu- 
pation, and another rank, much higher, from the splendor of 
the domestic menage. I warn the reader, therefore (or, rather, 
my explanations have already warned him), that he is not to 
infer, from any casual gleam of luxury or elegance, a corres- 
ponding elevation of rank. 

We, the children of the house, stood in fact upon the very 
happiest tier in the scaffolding of society for all good influ- 
ences. The prayer of Agar — " Give me neither poverty nor 
riches " — was reahzed for us. That blessing had we, being 
neither too high nor too low: high enough we were to see 
models of good manners; obscure enough to be left in the 
sweetest of solitudes. Amply furnished with the nobler bene- 
fits of wealth, extra means of health, of intellectual culture, and 
of elegant enjoyment, on the other hand, we knew nothing of 
its social distinctions. Not depressed by the consciousness of 
privations too sordid, not tempted into restlessness by the con- 
sciousness of privileges too aspiring, we had no motives for 
shame, we had none for pride. Grateful also to this hour I 
am, that, amidst luxuries in all things else, we were trained to 
a Spartan simplicity of diet, — that we fared, in fact, very much 
less sumptuously than the servants. And if (after the model of 
the Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks to 
Providence for all the separate blessings of my early situation, 
these four I would single out as chiefly worthy to be com- 
memorated — 'that I lived in the country; that I lived in soli- 
tude; that my infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of 
sisters, not by horrid pugilistic brothers; finally, that I and 
they were dutiful children, of a pure, holy, and magnificent 
church. 

The earliest incidents in my life which affected me so deeply 
as to be rememberable at this day were two, and both before I 




GREENHA F, ^EAK MAm HESTER, 

Early home of Thomas De Quincey. 

Photogravure from a drawing after an engravmg^. 



IS^ttMf^ 



lOO 



of a 



^ ol our 
•t- which, 





_ L: tj. .,» . S I ^ . . 




which we i; 




LKj Speak, betw 




iisually travels in 




e, is h( 




' be coli- 




rank, much 




T -va-r; th 


my cxj 




infer, fr 


' . , ., .. ,^,._* - - . 


pon<'jng el; 


\^S 7.y>\HtNA.T *Hr, 


We, the c) 




happiest tier 


,iHivaj§. 


The' 


prayer -: .^g-x " Uuc .. 


— was realizecf for us. That bl 



nomy of 

-.1 crnL- 



.K v(*iy 

id influ- 

i^overty nor 

ad we, being 

) low: high enough we were to see 

s; obscure enough to be left in the 

V furnished with the nobler 1 



Mn 



L..C 

Pr' 

thesf luiu 
memo rated 
tude; that my . 
sisters, not by 
they were dutif; 
church. 

The eadiest ir 



rly situation, 
to be r 
h'ved in 



c^, holy, anc 

affected me so deeply 
vo, and both before I 



^tmi^'i:^. 




SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS lOI 

could have completed my second year; namely, a remarkable 
dream of terrific grandeur about a favorite nurse, which is 
interesting for a reason to be noticed hereafter; and, secondly, 
the fact of having connected a profound sense of pathos with 
the reappearance, very early in the spring, of some crocuses. 
This I mention as inexplicable, for such annual resurrections 
of plants and flowers affect us only as memorials, or sugges- 
tions of a higher change, and therefore in connection with the 
idea of death ; but of death I could, at that time, have had no 
experience whatever. 

This, however, I was speedily to acquire. My two eldest 
sisters — eldest of three then living, and also older than my- 
self — were summoned to an early death. The first who died 
was Jane, about a year older than myself. She was three and 
a half, I two and a half, plus or minus some trifle that I do not 
recollect. But death was then scarcely intelligible to me, and 
I could not so properly be said to suffer sorrow as a sad per- 
plexity. There was another death in the house about the same 
time, namely, of a maternal grandmother; but as she had in 
a manner come to us for the express purpose of dying in her 
daughter's society, and from illness had lived perfectly 
secluded, our nursery party knew her but little, and were 
certainly more affected by the death (which I witnessed) of a 
favorite bird, namely, a kingfisher who had been injured by 
an accident. With my sister Jane's death (though otherwise, 
as I have said, less sorrowful than unintelligible) there was, 
however, connected an incident which made a most fearful 
impression upon myself, deepening my tendencies to thought- 
fulness and abstraction beyond what would seem credible for 
my years. If there was one thing in this world from which, 
more than from any other, nature had forced me to revolt, 
it was brutality and violence. Now, a whisper arose in the 
family that a woman-servant, who by accident was drawn ofiE 
from her proper duties to attend my sister Jane for a day or 
two, had on one occasion treated her harshly, if not brutally; 
and as this ill treatment happened within two days of her death, 
so that the occasion of it must have been some fretfulness in 
the poor child caused by her sufferings, naturally there was a 
sense of awe diffused through the family. I believe the story 
never reached my mother, and possibly it was exaggerated; 
but upon me the effect was terrific. I did not often see the 
person charged with this cruelty, but, when I did, my eyes 
sought the ground; nor could I have borne to look her in the 
face — not through anger; and as to vindictive thoughts, how 



I02 DE QUINCEY 

could these lodge in a powerless infant? The feeling which 
fell upon me was a shuddering awe, as upon a first glimpse of 
the truth that I was in a world of evil and strife. Though born 
in a large town, I had passed the whole of my childhood, 
except for the few earliest weeks, in a rural seclusion. With 
three innocent Httle sisters for playmates, sleeping always 
amongst them, and shut up forever in a silent garden from 
all knowledge of poverty, or oppression, or outrage, I had not 
suspected until this moment the true complexion of the world 
in which myself and my sisters were living. Henceforward 
the character of my thoughts must have changed greatly; for 
so representative are some acts, that one single case of the 
class is sufficient to throw open before you the whole theatre 
of possibilities in that direction. I never heard that the 
woman accused of this cruelty took it at all to heart, even 
after the event which so immediately succeeded had reflected 
upon it a more painful emphasis. On the other hand, I knew 
of a case, and will pause to mention it, where a mere sem- 
blance and shadow of such cruelty, under similar circum- 
stances, inflicted the grief of self-reproach through the 
remainder of life. A boy, interesting in his appearance, as 
also from his remarkable docility, was attacked, on a cold day 
of spring, by a complaint of the trachea — not precisely croup, 
but like it. He was three years old, and had been ill, perhaps, 
for four days; but at intervals had been in high spirits, and 
capable of playing. This sunshine, gleaming through dark 
clouds, had continued even on the fourth day; and from nine 
to eleven o'clock at night he had showed more animated 
pleasure than ever. An old servant, hearing of his illness, had 
called to see him; and her mode of talking with him had 
excited all the joyousness of his nature. About midnight, his 
mother, fancying that his feet felt cold, was muffling them up 
in flannels; and, as he seemed to resist her a little, she struck 
lightly on the sole of one foot as a mode of admonishing him 
to be quiet. He did not repeat his motion; and in less than 
a minute his mother had him in her arms with his face looking 
upwards. " What is the meaning," she exclaimed, in sudden 
affright, "of this strange repose settHng upon his features?" 
She called loudly to a servant in another room; but before the 
servant could reach her, the child had drawn two inspirations, 
deep, yet gentle — and had died in his mother's arms ! Upon 
this, the poor afflicted lady made the discovery that those 
struggles, which she had supposed to be expressions of resist- 
ance to herself, were the struggles of departing life. It fol- 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 103 

lowed, or seemed to follow, that with these final struggles had 
blended an expression, on her part, of displeasure. Doubtless 
the child had not distinctly perceived it; but the mother could 
never look back to that incident without self-reproach. And 
seven years afterward, when her own death happened, no 
progress had been made in reconciling her thoughts to that 
which only the depth of love could have viewed as an offence. 

So passed away from earth one out of those sisters that 
made up my nursery playmates; and so did my acquaintance 
(if such it could be called) commence with mortality. Yet, in 
fact, I knew little more of mortality than that Jane had disap- 
peared. She had gone away; but, perhaps, she would come 
back. Happy interval of heaven-born ignorance! Gracious 
immunity of infancy from sorrow disproportioned to its 
strength ! I was sad for Jane's absence. But still in my heart 
I trusted that she would come again. Summer and winter 
came again — crocuses and roses; why not little Jane? 

Thus easily was healed, then, the first wound in my infant 
heart. Not so the second. For thou, dear, noble Elizabeth, 
around whose ample brow, as often as thy sweet countenance 
rises upon the darkness, I fancy a tiara of light or a gleaming 
aureola in token of thy premature intellectual grandeur, — 
thou whose head, for its superb development, was the aston- 
ishment of science,* — thou next, but after an interval of happy 
years, thou also wert summoned away from our nursery; and 
the night which, for me, gathered upon that event, ran after 
my steps far into life ; and perhaps at this day I resemble little 
for good or for ill that which else I should have been. Pillar 
of fire that didst go before me to guide and to quicken, — pillar 
of darkness, when thy countenance was turned away to God 
that didst too truly shed the shadow of death over my young 
heart, — in what scales should I weigh thee? Was the blessing 
greater from thy heavenly presence, or the blight which fol- 
lowed thy departure? Can a man weigh off and value the 
glories of dawn against the darkness of hurricane? Or, if he 
could, how is it that, when a memorable love has been 
followed by a memorable bereavement, even suppose that God 
would replace the sufferer in a point of time anterior to the 
entire experience and offer to cancel the woe, but so that the 
sweet face which had caused the woe should also be oblit- 
erated, vehemently would every man shrink from the 
exchange ! In the " Paradise Lost,'' this strong instinct of man, 
to prefer the heavenly, mixed and polluted with the earthly, 
to a level experience offering neither one nor the other, is 



I04 DE QUINCE Y 

divinely commemorated. What words of pathos are in that 
speech of Adam's — " If God should make another Eve," etc. ; 
that is, if God should replace him in his primitive state, and 
should condescend to bring again a second Eve, one that 
would listen to no temptation, still that original partner of his 
earliest solitude — 

" Creature in whom excelled 
Whatever can to sight or thought be formed, 
Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet " — 

even now, when she appeared in league with an eternity of 
woe, and ministering to his ruin, could not be displaced for 
him by any better or happier Eve. ''Loss of thee! " he 
exclaims, in this anguish of trial — 

" Loss of thee 
Would never from my heart; no, no, I feel 
The link of nature draw me; flesh of flesh, 
Bone of my bone thou art; and from thy state 
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe." ' 

But what was it that drew my heart, by gravitation so strong, 
to my sister? Could a child, Httle above six years of age, place 
any special value upon her intellectual forwardness? Serene 
and capacious as her mind appeared to me upon after review, 
was that a charm for stealing away the heart of an infant? 
O, no! I think of it now with interest, because it lends, in a 
stranger's ear some justification to the excess of my fondness. 
But then it was lost upon me; or, if not lost, was but dimly 
perceived. Hadst thou been an idiot, my sister, not the less 
I must have loved thee, having that capacious heart over- 
flowing, even as mine overflowed, with tenderness, and stung, 
even as mine was stung, by the necessity of being loved. This 
it was which crowned thee with beauty — 

" Love, the holy sense, 
Best gift of God, in thee was most intense." 

That lamp lighted in Paradise was kindled for me which 
shone so steadily in thee; and never but to thee only, never 
again since thy departure, durst I utter the feelings which 
possessed me. For I was the shyest of children; and a natural 
sense of personal dignity held me back at all stages of life, 
from exposing the least ray of feelings which I was not 
encouraged wholly to reveal. 

It would be painful, and it is needless, to pursue the course 
of that sickness which carried off my leader and companion. 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 105 

She (according to my recollection at this moment) was just as 
much above eight years as I above six. And perhaps this 
natural precedency of authority in judgment, and the tender 
humility with which she declined to assert it, had been amongst 
the fascinations of her presence. It was upon a Sunday even- 
ing, or so people fancied, that the spark of fatal fire fell upon 
that train of predispositions to a brain complaint which had 
hitherto slumbered within her. She had been permitted to 
drink tea at the house of a laboring man, the father of an old 
female servant. The sun had set when she returned in the 
company of this servant through meadows reeking with 
exhalations after a fervent day. From that time she sickened. 
Happily, a child in such circumstances feels no anxieties. 
Looking upon medical men as people whose natural commis- 
sion it is to heal diseases, since it is their natural function to 
profess it, knowing them only as ex officio privileged to make 
war upon pain and sickness, I never had a misgiving about 
the result. I grieved, indeed, that my sister should lie in bed. 
I grieved still more sometimes to hear her moan. But all this 
appeared to me no more than a night of trouble, on which the 
dawn would soon arise. O ! moment of darkness and delirium, 
when a nurse awakened me from that delusion, and launched 
God's thunderbolt at my heart in the assurance that my sister 
must die. Rightly it is said of utter, utter misery, that it " can- 
not be remembered." * Itself, as a remarkable thing, is swal- 
lowed up in its own chaos. Mere anarchy and confusion of 
mind fell upon me. Deaf and blind I was, as I reeled under 
the revelation. I wish not to recall the circumstances of that 
time, when my agony was at its height, and hers in another 
sense was approaching. Enough to say, that all was soon 
over; and the morning of that day had at last arrived which 
looked down upon her innocent face, sleeping the sleep from 
which there is no awaking, and upon me sorrowing the sorrow 
for which there is no consolation. 

On the day after my sister's death, whilst the sweet temple 
of her brain was yet unviolated by human scrutiny, I formed 
my own scheme for seeing her once more. Not for the world 
would I have made this known, nor have suffered a witness 
to accompany me. I had never heard of feelings that take the 
name of " sentimental," nor dreamed of such a possibility. 
But grief even in a child hates the light, and shrinks from 
human eyes. The house was large: there were two staircases; 
and by one of these I knew that about noon, when all would 
be quiet, I could steal up into her chamber. I imagine that 



I06 DE QUINCEY 

it was exactly high noon when I reached the chamber door; 
it was locked but the key was not taken away. Entering, I 
closed the door so softly, that, although it opened upon a hall 
which ascended through all the stories, no echo ran along 
the silent walls. Then turning round, I sought my sister's 
face. But the bed had been moved, and the back was now 
turned. Nothing met my eyes but one large window wide 
open, through which the sun of midsummer at noonday was 
showering down torrents of splendor. The weather was dry, 
the sky was cloudless, the blue depths seemed the express 
types of infinity; and it was not possible for eye to behold or 
for heart to conceive any symbols more pathetic of life and 
the glory of life. 

Let me pause for one instant in approaching a remembrance 
so affecting and revolutionary for my own mind, and one 
which (if any earthly remembrance) will survive for me in 
the hour of death, — to remind some readers, and to inform 
others, that in the original *' Opium Confessions " I endeavored 
to explain the reason why death, caeteris paribus, is more pro- 
foundly afifeoting in summer than in other parts of the year; 
so far, at least, as it is liable to any modification at all from 
accidents of scenery or season. The reason, as I there sug- 
gested, lies in the antagonism between the tropical redundancy 
of life in summer and the dark sterilities of the grave. The 
summer we see, the grave we haunt with our thoughts; the 
glory is around us, the darkness is within us. And the two 
coming into collision, each exalts the other into stronger 
relief. But in my case there was even a subtler reason why 
the summer had this intense power of vivifying the spectacle 
or the thoughts of death. And, recollecting it, often I have 
been struck with the important truth, that far more of our 
deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed 
combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I 
may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of 
being disentangled, than ever reach us directly, and in their 
own abstract shapes. It had happened that amongst our nur- 
sery collection of books was the Bible illustrated with many 
pictures. And in long dark evenings, as my three sisters 
with myself sat by the firelight round the guard of our nur- 
sery, no book was so much in request amongst us. It ruled 
us and swayed us as mysteriously as music. One young nurse, 
whom we all loved, before any candle was lighted, would 
often strain her eyes to read it for us; and, sometimes, accord- 
ing to her simple powers, would endeavor to explain what we 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS IO7 

found obscure. We, the children, were all constitutionally 
touched with pensiveness; the fitful gloom and sudden lam- 
bencies of the room by firelight suited our evenmg state of 
feeUngs; and they suited, also, the divine revelations of power 
and mysterious beauty which awed us. Above all, the story 
of a just man — man and yet not man, real above all thmgs, 
and yet shadowy above all things, who had suffered the pas- 
sion of death in Palestine — slept upon our mmds hke early 
dawn upon the waters. The nurse knew and explamed to us 
the chief dififerences in oriental climates; and all these differ- 
ences (as it happens) express themselves in the great varieties 
of summer. The cloudless sunlights of Syria — those seemed 
to argue everlasting summer; the disciples plucking the ears 
of com — that must be summer; but, above all, the very name 
of Palm Sunday (a festival in the English church) troubled me 
like an anthem. " Sunday! " what was that? That was the 
day o^ peace which masked another peace deeper than the 
heart of man can comprehend. '' Palms! " what were they? 
That was an equivocal word; palms, in the sense of trophies, 
expressed the pomps of life; palms, as a product of nature, 
expressed the pomps of summer. Yet still even this explan- 
ation does not suffice; it was not merely by the peace and by 
the summer, by the deep sound of rest below all rest, and of 
ascending glory, that I had been haunted. It was also because 
Jerusalem stood near to those deep images both in time and 
in place. The great event of Jerusalem was at hand when 
Palm Sunday came; and the scene of that Sunday was near in 
place to Jerusalem. Yet what then was Jerusalem? Did I 
fancy it to be the omphalos (navel) of the earth? That pre- 
tension had once been made for Jerusalem, and once for 
Delphi; and both pretensions had become ridiculous, as the 
figure of the planet became known. Yes; but if not of the 
earth, for earth's tenant, Jerusalem was the omphalos of mor- 
tality. Yet how? there, on the contrary, it was, as we infants 
understood, that mortality had been trampled under foot 
True; but for that very reason, there it was that mortality had 
opened its very gloomiest crater. There it was, indeed that 
the human had risen on wings from the grave, but, for that 
reason, there also it was that the divine had been swallowed up 
by the abyss; the lesser star could not rise, before the greater 
would submit to eclipse. Summer, therefore, had connected 
itself with death, not merely as a mode of antagonism, but also 
through intricate relations to scriptural scenery and events. 
Out of this digression, which was almost necessary for the 



I08 DE QUINCEY 

purpose of showing how inextricably my feelings and images 
of death were entangled with those of summer, I return to the 
bed-chamber of my sister. From the gorgeous sunlight I 
turned round to the corpse. There lay the sweet childish 
figure; there the angel face; and, as people usually fancy, it 
was said in the house that no features had suffered any change. 
Had they not? The forehead, indeed — the serene and noble 
forehead, — that might be the same ; but the frozen eyehds, the 
darkness that seemed to steal from beneath them, the marble 
lips, the stiffening hands, laid palm to palm, as if repeating 
the supplications of closing anguish, — could these be mis- 
taken for life? Had it been so, wherefore did I not spring to 
those heavenly lips with tears and never-ending kisses? But 
so it was not. I stood checked for a moment ; awe, not fear, fell 
upon me ; and, whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow, — 
the most mournful that ear ever heard. Mournful! that is 
saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields of 
mortality for a hundred centuries. Many times since, upon a 
summer day, when the sun is about the hottest, I have 
remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, 
solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell. It is in this world the 
one sole audible symbol of eternity. And three times in my 
life I have happened to hear the same sound in the same cir- 
cumstances, namely, when standing between an open window 
and a dead body on a summer day. 

Instantly, when my ear caught this vast ^olian intonation, 
when my eye filled with the golden fullness of life, the pomps 
and glory of the heavens outside, and turning when it settled 
upon the frost which overspread my sister's face, instantly a 
trance fell upon me. A vault seemed to open in the zenith of 
the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up forever. I, in spirit, 
rose as if on billows that also ran up the shaft forever; and 
the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that 
also ran before us and fled away continually. The flight and 
the pursuit seemed to go on forever and ever. Frost, gather- 
ing frost, some Sarsar wind of death, seemed to repel me; I 
slept — for how long I cannot say; slowly I recovered my 
self-possession, and found myself standing, as before, close 
to my sister's bed. 

O flight of the solitary child to the solitary God — flight 
from the ruined corpse to the throne that could not be 
ruined ! — how rich wert thou in truth for after years ! Rap- 
ture of grief that, being too mighty for a child to sustain, 
foundest a happy obhvion in a heaven-born dream, and within 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 109 

that sleep didst conceal a dream, whose meaning", in after 
years, when slowly I deciphered, suddenly there flashed upon 
me new light; and even by the grief of a child, as I will show 
you, reader, hereafter, were confounded the falsehoods of 
philosophers. 

In the " Opium Confessions " I touched a little upon the ex- 
traordinary power connected with opium (after long use) of am- 
plifying the dimensions of time. Space, also, it amplifies by 
degrees that are sometimes terrific. But time it is upon which 
the exalting and multiplying power of opium chiefly spends 
its operation. Time becomes infinitely elastic, stretching out 
to such immeasurable and vanishing termini, that it seems 
ridiculous to compute the sense of it, on waking, by expres- 
sions commensurate to human life. As in starry fields one 
computes by diameters of the earth's orbit, or of Jupiter's, so, 
in valuing the virtual time lived during some dreams, the 
measurement by generations is ridiculous — by millenia is 
ridiculous; by aeons, I should say, if aeons were more deter- 
minate, would be also ridiculous. On this single occasion, 
however, in my life, the very inverse phenomenon occurred. 
But why speak of it in connection with opium? Could a child 
of six years old have been under that influence? No, but 
simply because it so exactly reversed the operation of opium. 
Instead of a short interval expanding into a vast one, upon 
this occasion a long one had contracted into a minute. I have 
reason to believe that a very long one had elapsed during 
this wandering or suspension of my perfect mind. When I 
returned to myself, there was a foot (or I fancied so) on the 
stairs. I was alarmed; for I believed that, if anybody should 
detect me, means would be taken to prevent my coming 
again. Hastily, therefore, I kissed the lips that I should kiss 
no more, and slunk like a guilty thing with stealthy steps 
from the room. Thus perished the vision, loveliest amongst 
all the shows which earth has revealed to me; thus mutilated 
was the parting which should have lasted forever; thus tainted 
with fear was the farewell sacred to love and grief, to perfect 
love and perfect grief. 

O, Ahasuerus, everlasting Jew!' fable or not a fable, thou 
when first starting on thy endless pilgrimage of woe, — thou 
when first flying through the gates of Jerusalem, and vainly 
yearning to leave the pursuing curse behind thee, — couldst 
not more certainly have read thy doom of sorrow in the mis- 
givings of thy troubled brain than I when passing forever from 
my sister's room. The worm was at my heart; and, confining 



no DE QUINCEY 

myself to that state of life, I may say, the worm that could not 
die. For if, when standing upon the threshold of manhood, I 
had ceased to feel its perpetual gnawings, that was because a 
vast expansion of intellect, it was because new hopes, new 
necessities, and the frenzy of youthful blood, had translated 
me into a new creature. Man is doubtless one by some subtle 
nexus that we cannot perceive, extending from the new-born 
infant to the superannuated dotard ; but as regards many affec- 
tions and passions incident to his nature at different stages, 
he is not one; the unity of man in this respect is coextensive 
only with the particular stage to which the passion belongs. 
Some passions, as that of sexual love, are celestial by one-half 
of their origin, animal and earthly by the other half. These 
will not survive their own appropriate stage. But love, which 
is altogether holy, like that between two children, will revisit 
undoubtedly by glimpses the silence and the darkness of old 
age, and I repeat my belief — that, unless bodily torment 
should forbid it, that final experience in my sister's bed-room, 
or some other in which her innocence was concerned, will 
rise again for me, to illuminate the hour of death. 

On the day following this which I have recorded, came a 
body of medical men to examine the brain, and the particular 
nature of the complaint, for in some of its symptoms it had 
shown perplexing anomalies. Such is the sanctity of 
death, and especially of death alighting on an inno- 
cent child, that even gossiping people do not gossip 
on such a subject. Consequently, I knew nothing of 
the purpose which drew together these surgeons, nor sus- 
pected anything of the cruel changes which might have been 
wrought in my sister's head. Long after this, I saw a similar 
case; I surveyed the corpse (it was that of a beautiful boy, 
eighteen years old, who had died of the same complaint) one 
hour after the surgeons had laid the skull in ruins; but the 
dishonors of this scrutiny were hidden by bandages, and had 
not disturbed the repose of the countenance. So it might have 
been here; but, if it were not so, then I was happy in being 
spared the shock, from having that marble image of peace, icy 
and rigid as it was, unsettled by disfiguring images. Some 
hours after the strangers had withdrawn, I crept again to the 
room ; but the door was now locked, the key was taken away — 
and I was shut out forever. 

Then came the funeral. I, as a point of decorum, was car- 
ried thither. I was put into a carriage with some gentlemen 
whom I did not know. They were kind to me; but naturally 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 1 1 1 

they talked of things disconnected with the occasion, and their 
conversation was a torment. At the church, I was told to hold 
a white handkerchief to my eyes. Empty hypocrisy! AVhat 
need had he of masques or mockeries, whose heart died within 
him at every word that was uttered? During that part of the 
service which passed within the church, I made an effort to 
attend ; but I sank back continually into my own solitary dark- 
ness, and I heard little consciously, except some fugitive 
strains from the sublime chapter of St. Paul, which in England 
is always read at burials. And here I noticed a profound 
error of our present illustrious laureate. When I heard those 
dreadful words, — for dreadful they were to me, — " It is sown 
in corruption, it is raised in incorruption ; it is sown in dis- 
honor, it is raised in glory; " such was the recoil of my feel- 
ings, that I could even have shrieked out a protesting — " O, 
no, no! " if I had not been restrained by the publicity of the 
occasion. In after years, reflecting upon this revolt of my feel- 
ings, which, being the voice of nature in a child, must be as 
true as any mere opinion of a child might probably be false, I 
saw, at once, the unsoundness of a passage in "The Excursion." 
The book is not here but the substance I remember perfectly. 
Mr. Wordsworth argues, that if it were not for the unsteady 
faith which people fix upon the beatific condition after death 
of those whom they deplore, nobody could be found so selfish 
as even secretly to wish for the restoration to earth of a 
beloved object. A mother, for instance, could never dream of 
yearning for her child, and secretly calling it back by her silent 
aspirations from the arms of God, if she were but reconciled 
to the belief that really it was in those arms. But this I 
utterly deny. To take my own case, when I heard those dread- 
ful words of St. Paul applied to my sister, namely, that she 
should be raised a spiritual body, nobody can suppose that 
selfishness, or any other feeling than that of agonizing love, 
caused the rebellion of my heart against them. I knew already 
that she was to come again in beauty and power. I did not 
now learn this for the first time. And that thought, doubtless, 
made my sorrow sublimer; but also it made it deeper. For 
here lay the sting of it, namely, in the fatal words — " We 
shall be changed.'' How was the unity of my interest in her to 
be preserved, if she were to be altered, and no longer to reflect 
in her sweet countenance the traces that were sculptured on 
my heart? Let a magician ask any woman whether she will 
permit him to improve her child, to raise it even from deform- 
ity to perfect beauty, if that must be done at the cost of its 



112 DE QUINCEY 

identity, and there is no loving mother but would reject his 
proposal with horror. Or, to take a case that has actually 
happened, if a mother were robbed of her child, at two years 
old, by gypsies, and the same child were restored to her at 
twenty, a fine young man, but divided by a sleep as it were 
of death from all remembrances that could restore the broken 
links of their once tender connection, — would she not feel her 
grief unhealed, and her heart defrauded? Undoubtedly she 
would. All of us ask not of God for a better thing than that 
we have lost; we ask for the same, even with its faults and its 
frailties. It is true that the sorrowing person will also be 
changed eventually, but that must be by death. And a pros- 
pect so remote as that, and so alien from our present nature, 
cannot console us in an affliction which is not remote, but 
present — which is not spiritual, but human. 

Lastly came the magnificent service which the English 
Church performs at the side of the grave. There is exposed 
once again, and for the last time, the coffin. All eyes survey 
the record of name, of sex, of age, and the day of departure 
from earth, — records how useless! and dropped into dark- 
ness as if messages addressed to worms. Almost at the very 
last comes the symbolic ritual, tearing and shattering the 
heart with volleying discharges, peal after peal, from the final 
artillery of woe. The coffin is lowered into its home; it has 
disappeared from the eye. The sacristan stands ready, with 
his shovel of earth and stones. The priest's voice is heard 
once more, — " earth to earth," and the dread rattle ascends 
from the lid of the coffin ; " ashes to ashes," and again the kill- 
ing sound is heard ; " dust to dust," and the farewell volley 
announces that the grave — the coffin — the face are sealed up 
forever and ever. 

O, grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing passions. 
And true it is, that thou humblest to the dust, but also thou 
exaltest to the clouds. Thou shakest as with ague, but also 
thou steadiest like frost. Thou sickenest the heart, but also 
thou healest its infirmities. Among the very foremost of mine 
was morbid sensibility to shame. And, ten years afterwards, 
I used to reproach myself with this infirmity, by supposing the 
case, that, if it were thrown upon me to seek aid for a per- 
ishing fellow-creature, and that I could obtain that aid only 
by facing a vast company of critical or sneering faces, I might 
perhaps, shrink basely from the duty. It is true, that no such 
case had ever actually occurred, so that it was a mere romance 
of casuistry to tax myself with cowardice so shocking. But, 



StrSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 1 1 3 

to feel a doubt was to feel condemnation; and the crime 
which might have been was in my eyes the crime which had 
been. Now, however, all was changed; and for anything 
which regarded my sister's memory, in one hour I received a 
new heart. Once in Westmoreland I saw a case resembling 
it. I saw a ewe suddenly put off and abjure her own nature, 
in a service of love, — yes, slough it as completely as ever ser- 
pent sloughed his skin. Her lamb had fallen into a deep 
trench, from which all escape was hopeless, without the aid of 
man. And to a man she advanced boldly, bleating clamor- 
ously, until he followed her and rescued her beloved. Not less 
was the change in myself. Fifty thousand sneering faces 
would not have troubled me in any office of tenderness to my 
sister's memory. Ten legions would not have repelled me 
from seeking her, if there was a chance that she could be 
found. Mockery! it was lost upon me. Laugh at me, as one 
or two people did! I valued not their laughter. And when I 
was told insultingly to cease " my girhsh tears," that word 
" girlish " had no sting for me, except as a verbal echo to the 
one eternal thought of my heart, — that a girl was the sweetest 
thing I, in my short life, had known, — that a girl it was who 
had crowned the earth with beauty, and had opened to my thirst 
fountains of pure celestial love, from Vv^hich, in this world, I 
was to drink no more. 

Interesting it is to observe how certainly all deep feelings 
agree in this, that they seek for solitude, and are nursed by 
solitude. Deep grief, deep love, how naturally do these ally 
themselves with religious feeling; and all three — love, grief, 
religion — are haunters of solitary places. Love, grief, the 
passion of reverie, or the mystery of devotion, — what were^ 
these, without solitude? All day long, when it was not impos- 
sible for me to do so, I sought the most silent and sequestered 
nooks in the grounds about the house, or in the neighboring 
fields. The awful stillness occasionally of summer noons, 
when no winds were abroad, the appealing silence of gray or 
misty afternoons, — these were fascinations as of witchcraft. 
Into the woods or the desert air I gazed, as if some comfort lay 
hid in them. I wearied the heavens with my inquest of 
beseeching looks. I tormented the blue depths with obstinate 
scrutiny, sweeping them with my eyes, and searching them for- 
ever after one angelic face that might, perhaps, have perrnis- 
sion to reveal itself for a moment. The faculty of shaping 
images in the distance out of sHght elements, and grouping 
them after the yearnings of the heart, aided by a slight defect 
8 



114 ^^ QUINCE Y 

in my eyes, grew upon me at this time. And I recall at the 
present moment one instance of that sort, which may show 
how merely shadows, or a gleam of brightness, or nothing at 
all, could furnish a sufficient basis for this creative faculty. 
On Sunday mornings I was always taken to church: it was a 
church on the old and natural model of England, having aisles, 
galleries, organs, all things ancient and venerable, and the pro- 
portions majestic. Here, whilst the congregation knelt 
through the long litany, as often as we came to that passage, 
so beautiful amongst many that are so, where God is sup- 
plicated on behalf of " all sick persons and young children," 
and that he would " show his pity upon all prisoners and cap- 
tives,'': — I wept in secret, and raising my streaming eyes to the 
windows of the galleries, saw, on days when the sun was shin- 
ing, a spectacle as affecting as ever prophet can have beheld. 
The sides of the windows were rich with storied glass ; through 
the deep purples and crimsons streamed the golden light; 
emblazonries of heavenly illumination mingling with the 
earthly emblazonries of what is grandest in man. There were 
the apostles that had trampled upon earth, and the glories of 
earth, out of celestial love to man. There were the martyrs 
that had borne witness to the truth through flames, through 
torments, and through armies of fierce insulting faces. There 
were the saints, who, under intolerable pangs, had glorified 
God by meek submission to his will. And all the time, whilst 
this tumult of sublime memorials held on as the deep chords 
from an accompaniment in the bass, I saw through the wide 
central field of the windows, where the glass was uncolored, 
white fleecy clouds saiHng over the azure depths of the sky; 
were it but a fragment or a hint of such a cloud, immediately 
under the flash of my sorrow-haunted eye, it grew and shaped 
itself into visions of beds with white awny curtains; and in the 
beds lay sick children; dying children, that were tossing in 
anguish, and weeping clamorously for death. God, for some 
mysterious reason, could not suddenly release them from their 
pain; but he suffered the beds, as it seemed, to rise slowly 
through the clouds; slowly the beds ascended into the cham- 
bers of the air; slowly, also, his arms descended from the heav- 
ens, that he and his young children, whom in Judea, once and 
forever, he had blessed, though they must pass slowly through 
the dreadful chasm of separation, might yet meet the sooner. 
These visions were self-sustained. These visions needed not 
that any sound should speak to me or music mould my feelings. 
The hint from the litany, the fragment from the clouds, — those 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 1 1 5 

and the storied windows were sufficient. But not the less the 
blare of the tumultuous organ wrought its own separate crea- 
tions. And oftentimes in anthems, when the mighty instru- 
ment threw its vast columns of sound, fierce yet melodious, 
over the voices of the choir, — when it rose high in arches, as 
might seem, surmounting and overriding the strife of the vocal 
parts, and gathering by strong coercion the total storm into 
unity, — sometimes I seemed to walk triumphantly upon those 
clouds which so recently I had looked up to as mementos of 
prostrate sorrow, and even as ministers of sorrow in its crea- 
tions; yes, sometimes under the transfigurations of music, I 
felt' of grief itself as a fiery chariot for mounting victoriously 
above the causes of grief. 

I point so often to the feelings, the ideas, or the ceremonies 
of religion, because there never yet was profound grief nor 
profound philosophy which did not inosculate at many points 
with profound religion. But I request the reader to under- 
stand, that of all things I was not, and could not have been, a 
child trained to talk of religion, least of all to talk of it contro- 
versially or polemically. Dreadful is the picture, which in 
books we sometimes find, of children discussing the doctrines 
of Christianity, and even teaching their seniors the boundaries 
and distinctions between doctrine and doctrine. And it has 
often struck me with amazement, that the two things which 
God made most beautiful among his works, namely, infancy 
and pure religion, should, by the folly of man (in yoking them 
together on erroneous principles), neutralize each other's 
beauty, or even form a combination positively hateful. The 
religion becomes nonsense, and the child becomes a hypocrite. 
The religion is transfigured into cant, and the innocent child 
into a dissembling liar.' 

God, be assured, takes care for the religion of children, 
wheresoever his Christianity exists. Wheresoever there is a 
national church established, to which a child sees his friends 
resorting, — wheresoever he beholds all whom he honors peri- 
odically prostrate before those illimitable heavens which fill to 
overflowing his young, adoring heart, — wheresoever he sees 
the sleep of death, falling at intervals upon men and women 
whom he knows, depth as confounding to the plummet of his 
mind as those heavens ascend beyond his power to pursue, — 
there take you no thought for the religion of a child, any more 
than for the lilies how they shall be arrayed, or for the ravens 
how they shall feed their young. 

God speaks to children, also, in dreams, and by the oracles 



Il6 DE QUINCEY 

that lurk in darkness. But in solitude, above all things, when 
made vocal by the truths and services of a national church, God 
holds " communion undisturbed " with children. Solitude, 
though silent as light, is, Uke light, the mightiest of agencies; 
for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world 
alone; all leave it alone. Even a little child has a dread, whis- 
pering consciousness, that if he should be summoned to travel 
into God's presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead 
him by the hand, nor mother to carry him in her arms, nor 
little sister to share his trepidations. King and priest, warrior 
and maiden, philosopher and child, all must walk those mighty 
galleries alone. The solitude, therefore, which in this world 
appals or fascinates a child's heart, is but the echo of a far 
deeper solitude through which already he has passed, and of 
another solitude, deeper still, through which he has to pass: 
reflex of one solitude — prefiguration of another. 

O, burthen of solitude, that cleavest to man through every 
stage of his being! in his birth, which has been, — in his life, 
which is, — in his death, which shall be, — mighty and essential 
solitude ! that wast, and art, and art to be ; — thou broodest, like 
the spirit of God moving upon the surface of the deeps, over 
every heart that sleeps in the nurseries of Christendom. Like 
the vast laboratory of the air, which, seeming to be nothing, 
or less than the shadow of a shade, hides within itself the prin- 
ciples of all things, solitude for the child is the Agrippa's mir- 
ror of the unseen universe. Deep is the solitude in life of mil- 
lions upon millions, who, with hearts welling forth love, have 
none to love them. Deep is the solitude of those who, with 
secret griefs, have none to pity them. Deep is the solitude of 
those, who, fighting with doubts of darkness, have none to 
counsel them. But deeper than the deepest of these solitudes 
is that which broods over childhood, bringing before it, at inter- 
vals, the final solitude which watches for it, and is waiting for 
it within the gates of death. Reader, I tell you a truth, and 
hereafter I will convince you of this truth, that for a Grecian 
child solitude was nothing, but for a Christian child it has 
become the power of God and the mystery of God. O, mighty 
and essential solitude, that wast, and art, and are to be! thou 
kindling under the torch of Christian revelations, art now trans- 
figured forever, and hast passed from a blank negation into a 
secret hieroglyphic from God, shadowing in the hearts of 
infancy the very dimmest of his truths ! 

"But you forget her," says the cynic; "you happened one 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 1 1 7 

day to forget this sister of yours." Why not? To cite the 
beautiful words of Wallenstein, — 

"What pang 
Is permanent with man? From the highest, 
As from the vilest thing of every day, 
He learns to wean himself. For the strong hours 
Conquer him." ' 
Yes there lies the fountain of human oblivions. It is Time, 
the great conqueror, it is the " strong hours " whose batteries 
storm every passion of men. For, in the «"% fP^^^^'O" °* 
Schiller, " Was verschmerzte nicht der mensch? What sor- 
row is in man that will not finally fret itself to sleep? Con- 
quering, at last gates of brass, or pyramids o granite, why 
should it be a marvel to us, or a triumph to Time, that he is 
able to conquer a frail human heart? ,.,,.„ ,„,h tu^t 

However, for this once, my cynic must submit to be told that 
he is wrong. Doubtless, it is presumption in me to suggest 
that his sneers can ever go awry, any more than the shafts of 
Apollo. But still, however impossible such a thing is, in tms 
one case it happens that they have. And when it happens that 
thev do not, I will tell you, reader, why, in my opinion, it is, 
and you will see that it warrants no exultation in the cynic 
Reoeatedlv I have heard a mother reproaching herself when 
the birth-day revolved of the little daughter whom so suddenly 
she had lost, with her own insensibility, that could so soon need 
a remembrancer of the day. But, besides that the majority o^ 
people in this world (as being people called to labour) have no 
time left for cherishing grief by solitude and meditation, always 
Ts proper to ask whether the memory of the lost person were 
chiefly dependent upon a visual image. No death is usually 
half so affecting as the death of a young child from two to five 

^^But°vet, for the same reason which makes the grief more 
exquisite, generally for such a loss it is likely to be mo'-e pensh- 
able Wherever the image, visually or audibly, of the lost per- 
son is more essential to the life of the grief, there the grief will 

%"«: begin's°oTn (in Shakespeare's fine expression) to " dis- 
linin;" features fluctuate; combinations of feature unsettle. 
Even the expression becomes a mere idea that you can describe 
to another, but not an image that you can ^^P^^^X^IvZl 
self Therefore it is that the faces of infants, though they are 
divine as flowers in a savanna of Texas, or as the caro llmg o 
birds in a forest, are, like flowers in Texas, and the carolling of 



Il8 DE QUINCEY 

birds in a forest, soon overtaken by the pursuing darkness that 
swallows up all things human. All glories of flesh vanish; and 
this, the glory of infantine beauty seen in the mirror of the 
memory, soonest of all. But when the departed persons 
worked upon yourself by powers that were intellectual and 
moral, — powers in the flesh, though not of the flesh, — the 
memorials in your own heart become more steadfast, if less 
affecting at the first. Now, in my sister were combined for 
me both graces, — the graces of childhood, and the graces of 
expanding thought. Besides that, as regards merely the per- 
sonal image, always the smooth rotundity of baby features must 
vanish sooner, as being less individual than the features in a 
child of eight, touched with a pensive tenderness, and exalted 
into a characteristic expression by a premature intellect. 

Rarely do things perish from my memory that are worth 
remembering. Rubbish dies instantly. Hence it happens 
that passages in Latin or English poets, which I never could 
have read but once (and that thirty years ago), often begin to 
blossom anew when I am lying awake, unable to sleep. I 
become a distinguished compositor in the darkness: and, with 
my aerial composing-stick, sometimes I " set-up " half a page 
of verses, that would be found tolerably correct if collated with 
the volume that I never had in my hand but once. I mention 
this in no spirit of boasting. Far from it : for, on the contrary, 
among my mortifications have been compliments to my mem- 
ory, when, in fact, any compliment that I had merited was due 
to the higher faculty of an electric aptitude for seizing analo- 
gies, and by means of those aerial pontoons passing over like 
lightning from one topic to another. Still it is a fact that this 
pertinacious life of memory for things that simply touch the 
ear, without touching the consciousness, does, in fact, beset 
me. Said but once, said but softly, not marked at all, words 
revive before me in darkness and solitude; and they arrange 
themselves gradually into sentences, but through an effort 
sometimes of a distressing kind, to which I am in a manner 
forced to become a party. This being so, it was no great 
instance of that power, that three separate passages in the 
funeral service, all of which but one had escaped my notice at 
the time, and even that one as to the part I am going to men- 
tion, but all of which must have struck on my ear, restored 
themselves perfectly when I was lying awake in bed; and 
though struck by their beauty, I was also incensed by what 
seemed to me the harsh sentiment expressed in two of these 
passages. I will cite all the three in an abbreviated form, 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 119 

both for my immediate purpose, and for the indirect purpose 
of giving to those unacquainted with the EngHsh funeral ser- 
vice some specimens of its beauty. 

The first passage was this: " Forasmuch as it hath pleased 
Almighty God, of his great mercy, to take unto himself the 
soul of our dear sister here departed, we therefore commit her 
body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, 
in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal Hfe." 

I pause to remark that a sublime effect arises at this point 
through a sudden rapturous interpolation from the Apocalypse, 
which, according to the rubric, "shall be said or sung;" but 
always let it be sung, and by the full choir: 

" I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write from 
henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the Lord; even 
so saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labours." 

The second pasage, almost immediately succeeding to this 
awful burst of heavenly trumpets, and the one which more 
particularly offended me, though otherwise even then, in my 
seventh year, I could not but be touched by its beauty, was 
this : " Almighty God, with whom do live the spirits of them 
that depart hence in the Lord, and with whom the souls of the 
faithful, after they are delivered from the burden of the flesh, 
are in joy and felicity; we give thee hearty thanks that it hath 
pleased thee to deliver this our sister out of the miseries of this 
sinful world; beseeching thee, that it may please thee of thy 
gracious goodness shortly to accompHsh the number of thine 
elect, and to hasten thy kingdom." 

In what world was I living when a man (calling himself a 
man of God) could stand up publicly and give God '' hearty 
thanks " that he had taken away my sister? But, young child, 
understand — taken her away from the miseries of this sinful 
world. O yes! I hear what you say; I understand that; but 
that makes no difference at all. She being gone, this world 
doubtless (as you say) is a world of unhappiness. But for me 
ubi Csesar, ibi Roma — where my sister was, there was para- 
dise; no matter whether in heaven above, or on the earth 
beneath. And he had taken her away, cruel priest! of his "great 
mercy!" I did not presume, child though I was, to thmk 
rebelliously against that. The reason was not any hypocritical 
or canting submission where my heart yielded none, but 
because already my deep musing intellect had perceived a mys- 
tery and a labyrinth in the economies of this world. God, I 
saw, moved not as we moved — walked not as we walked — 
thought not as we think. Still I saw no mercy to myself, a 



1 20 DE QUINCEY 

poor, frail, dependent creature, torn away so suddenly from the 
prop on which altogether it depended. O yes! perhaps there 
was; and many years after I came to suspect it. Nevertheless 
it was a benignity that pointed far ahead; such as by a child 
could not have been perceived, because then the great arch 
had not come round; could not have been recognized, if it had 
come round; could not have been valued, if it had even been 
dimly recognized. 

Finally, as the closing prayer in the whole service, stood 
this, which I acknowledged then, and now acknowledge, as 
equally beautiful and consolatory; for in this was no harsh 
peremptory challenge to the infirmities of human grief, as to a 
thing not meriting notice in a religious rite. On the con- 
trary, there was a gracious condescension from the great 
apostle to grief, as to a passion that he might perhaps himself 
have participated. 

" O, merciful God! the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who 
is the resurrection and the life, in whom whosoever believeth 
shall live, though he die ; who also taught us by his holy apostle 
St. Paul not to be sorry, as men without hope, for them that 
sleep in him; we meekly beseech thee, oh Father! to raise us 
from the death of sin unto the life of righteousness ; that, when 
we shall depart this life, we may rest in him as our hope 
is — that this our sister doth." 

Ah, that was beautiful, — that was heavenly! We might be 
sorry, we had leave to be sorry; only not without hope. And 
we were by hope to rest in Him, as this our sister doth. And 
howsoever a man may think that he is without hope, I, that 
have read the writing upon these great abysses of grief, and 
viewed their shadows under the correction of mightier shadows 
from deeper abysses since then, abysses of aboriginal fear and 
eldest darkness, in which yet I believe that all hope had not 
absolutely died, know that he is in a natural error. If, for a 
moment, I and so many others, wallowing in the dust of afflic- 
tion, could yet rise up suddenly like the dry corpse" which 
stood upright in the glory of life when touched by the bones 
of the prophet; if in those vast choral anthems, heard by my 
childish ear, the voice of God wrapt itself as in a cloud of 
music, saying — '* Child, that sorrowest, I command thee to 
rise up and ascend for a season into my heaven of heavens," — 
then it was plain that despair, that the anguish of darkness, was 
not essential to such sorrow, but might come and go even as 
light comes and goes upon our troubled earth. 

Yes! the light may come and go; grief may wax and wane; 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 1 2 I 

grief may sink; and grief again may rise as in impassioned 
minds oftentimes it does, even to the heaven of heavens; but 
there is a necessity that, if too much left to itself in solitude, 
finally it will descend into a depth from which there is no 
reascent; into a disease which seems no disease; into a lan- 
guishing which, from its very sweetness, perplexes the mind, 
and is fancied to be very health. Witchcraft has seized upon 
you, — nympholepsy has struck you. Now you have no more. 
You acquiesce; nay, you are passionately delighted in your 
condition. Sweet becomes the grave, because you also hope 
immediately to travel thither: luxurious is the separation, 
because only perhaps for a few weeks shall it exist for you ; and 
it will then prove but the brief summer night that had retarded 
a little, by a refinement of rapture, the heavenly dawn of 
reunion. Inevitable sometimes it is in soHtude — that this 
should happen with minds morbidly meditative; that, when 
we stretch out our arms in darkness, vainly striving to draw 
back the sweet faces that have vanished, slowly arises a new 
stratagem of grief, and we say, — " Be it that they no more 
come back to us, yet what hinders but we should go to them?" 
Perilous is that crisis for the young. In its effect perfectly 
the same as the ignoble witchcraft of the poor African Obeah,'" 
this sublimer witchcraft of grief will, if left to follow its own 
natural course, terminate in the same catastrophe of death. 
Poetry, which neglects no phenomena that are interesting to 
the heart of man, has sometimes touched a little 

" On the sublime attractions of the grave." 

But you think that these attractions, existing at times for 
the adult, could not exist for the child. Understand that you 
are wrong. Understand that these attractions do exist for the 
child ; and perhaps as much more strongly than they can exist 
for the adult, by the whole difference between the concentra- 
tion of a childish love, and the inevitable distraction upon mul- 
tipHed objects of any love that can affect any adult. There is 
a German superstition (well known by a popular translation) of 
the Erl-king's Daughter, who fixes her love upon some child, 
and seeks to wile him away into her own shadowy kingdom in 

forests. „ 

" Who is it that rides through the forest so fast? 

It is a knight, who carries his child before him on the saddle. 
The Erl-King's Daughter rides on his right hand, and still 
whispers temptations to the infant audible only to him. 



122 DE QUINCEY 

*' If thou wilt, dear baby, with me go away. 
We will see a fine show, we will play a fine play." 

The consent of the baby is essential to her success. And 
finally she does succeed. Other charms, other temptations, 
would have been requisite for me. My intellect was too 
advanced for those fascinations. But could the Erl-king's 
Daughter have revealed herself to me, and promised to lead 
me where my sister was, she might have wiled me by the hand 
into the dimmest forests upon earth. Languishing was my 
condition at that time. Still I languished for things " which " 
(a voice from heaven seemed to answer through my own heart) 
" cannot be granted ; " and which, when again I languished, 
again the voice repeated, '' cannot be granted." 

Well it was for me that, at this crisis, I was summoned to 
put on the harness of life by commencing my classical studies 
under one of my guardians, a clergyman of the English Church, 
and (so far as regarded Latin) a most accomplished scholar. 

At the very commencement of my new studies there hap- 
pened an incident which afflicted me much for a short time, 
and left behind a gloomy impression, that suffering and wretch- 
edness were diffused amongst all creatures that breathe. A 
person had given me a kitten. There are three animals which 
seem, beyond all others, to reflect the beauty of human infancy 
in two of its elements — namely, joy and guileless innocence, 
though less in its third element of simplicity, because that 
requires language for its full expression: these three animals 
are the kitten, the lamb, and the fawn. Other creatures may 
be as happy, but they do not show it so much. Great was the 
love which poor silly I had for this little kitten; but, as I left 
home at ten in the morning, and did not return till near five in 
the afternoon, I was obliged, with some anxiety, to throw it 
for those seven hours upon its own discretion, as infirm a basis 
for reasonable hope as could be imagined. I did not wish the 
kitten, indeed, at all less foolish than it was, except just when 
I was leaving home, and then its exceeding folly gave me a 
pang. Just about that time, it happened that we had received, 
as a present from Leicestershire, a fine young Newfoundland 
dog, who was under a cloud of disgrace for crimes of his youth- 
ful blood committed in that county. One day he had taken too 
great a liberty with a prettly Httle cousin of mine, Emma 

H , about four years old. He had, in fact, bitten off her 

cheek, which, remaining attached by a shred, was, through the 
energy of a governess, replaced, and subsequently healed with- 
out a scar. His name being Turk, he was immediately pro- 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 1 23 

nounced by the best Greek scholar of that neighborhood, 
iniovoiioc;, (that is, named significantly, or reporting his 
nature in his name). But as Miss Emma confessed to having 
been engaged in taking away a bone from him, on which sub- 
ject no dog can be taught to understand a joke, it did not strike 
our own authorities that he was to be considered in a state 
of reprobation ; and as our gardens (near to a great town) were, 
on account chiefly of melons, constantly robbed, it was held 
that a moderate degree of fierceness was rather a favorable trait 
in his character. My poor kitten, it was supposed, had been 
engaged in the same playful trespass upon Turk's property as 
my Leicestershire cousin, and Turk laid her dead on the spot. 
It is impossible to describe my grief when the case was made 
known to me at five o'clock in the evening, by a man's holding 
out the little creature dead : she that I had left so full of glorious 
life — life which even in a kitten is infinite, — was now stretched 
in motionless repose. I remember that there was a large 
coal-stack in the yard. I dropped my Latin books, sat down 
upon a huge block of coal, and burst into a passion of tears. 
The man, struck with my tumultuous grief, hurried into the 
house; and from the lower regions deployed instantly the 
women of the laundry and 'the kitchen. No one subject is so 
absolutely sacred, and enjoys so classical a sanctity among 
servant-girls, as i. Grief; and 2. Love which is unfortunate. 
All the young women took me up in their arms and kissed me; 
and, last of all, an elderly woman, who was the cook, not only 
kissed me, but wept so audibly, from some suggestion doubt- 
less of grief personal to herself, that I threw my arms about 
her neck and kissed her also. It is probable, as I now sup- 
pose, that some account of my grief for my sister had reached 
them. Else I was never allowed to visit their region of the 
house. But, however that might be, afterwards it struck me, 
that if I had met with so much sympathy, or with any sym- 
pathy at all, from the servant chiefly connected with myself in 
the desolating grief I had sufifered, possibly I should not have 
been so profoundly shaken. 

But did I in the meantime feel anger towards Turk? Not 
the least. And the reason was this: My guardian, who 
taught me Latin, was in the habit of coming over and dining 
at my mother's table whenever he pleased. On these occa- 
sions, he, who like myself pitied dependent animals, went invari- 
ably into the yard of the offices, taking me with him, and 
unchained the dogs. There were two, — Grim, a mastiflf, and 
Turk, our young friend. My guardian was a bold, athletic 



124 DE QUINCEY 

man, and delighted in dogs. He told me, which also my own 
heart told me, that these poor dogs languished out their lives 
under this confinement. The moment that I and my guardian 
(ego et rex mens) appeared in sight of the two kennels, it is 
impossible to express the joy of the dogs. Turk was usually 
restless; Grim slept away his life in surliness. But at the sight 
of us, — of my little insignificant self and my six-foot guardian, 
— both dogs yelled with delight. We unfastened their chains 
with our own hands, they licking our hands; and as to myself 
licking my miserable little face; and at one bound they 
reentered upon their natural heritage of joy. Always we took 
them through the fields, where they molested nothing, and 
closed with giving them a cold bath in the brook which 
bounded my father's property. What despair must have 
possessed our dogs when they were taken back to their hateful 
prisons ! and I, for my part, not enduring to see their misery, 
slunk away when their rechaining commenced. It was in 
vain to tell me that all people, who had property out of doors 
to protect, chained up dogs in the same way. This only proved 
the extent of the oppression; for a monstrous oppression it 
did seem, that creatures, boiling with life and the desires of 
life, should be thus detained in captivity until they were set 
free by death. That liberation visited poor Grim and Turk 
sooner than any of us expected, for they were both poisoned, 
within the year that followed, by a party of burglars. At the 
end of that year, I was reading the ^neid; and it struck me, 
who remembered the howling recusancy of Turk, as a pecul- 
iarly fine circumstance, introduced amongst the horrors of 
Tartarus, that sudden gleam of powerful animals, full of life and 
conscious rights, rebelling against chains: — 

" Irseque leonum 
Vincla recusantum." " 

Vergil had doubtless picked up that gem in his visits at seeding- 
time to the cavese of the Roman amphitheatre. But the rights 
of brute creatures to a merciful forbearance on the part of man 
could not enter into the feeblest conceptions of one belonging 
to a nation that (although too noble to be wantonly cruel) yet 
in the same amphitheatre manifested so little regard even to 
human rights. Under Christianity the condition of the brute 
has improved, and will improve much more. There is ample 
room. For, I am sorry to say, that the commonest vice of 
Christian children, too often surveyed with careless eyes by 
mothers that in their human relations are full of kindness, is 



I 



3USPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 125 

cruelty to the inferior creatures thrown upon their mercy. 
For my own part, what had formed the ground-work of my 
happiness (since joyous was my nature, though overspread 
with a cloud of sadness) had been from the first a heart over- 
flowing with love. And I had drunk in too profoundly the 
spirit of Christianity from our many nursery readings, not to 
read also in its divine words the justification of my own ten- 
dencies. That which I desired was the thing which I ought 
to desire; the mercy that I loved was the mercy that God had 
blessed. From the Sermon on the Mount resounded forever 
in my ears — ''Blessed are the merciful!" I needed not to 
add — " For they shall obtain mercy." By lips so holy and 
when standing in the atmosphere of truths so divine, simply 
to have been blessed — that was a sufficient ratification; every 
truth so revealed, and so hallowed by position, starts into sud- 
den life, and becomes to itself its own authentication, needing 
no proof to convince, — needing no promise to allure. 

It may well be supposed, therefore, that having so early 
awakened within me what may be philosophically called the 
transcendental justice of Christianity, I blamed not Turk for 
yielding to the coercion of his nature. He had killed the 
object of my love. But, besides that he was under the con- 
straint of a primary appetite, Turk was himself the victim of a 
kilHng oppression. He was doomed to a fretful existence so 
long as he should exist at all. Nothing could reconcile this to 
my benignity, which at that time rested upon two pillars, — 
upon the deep, deep heart which God had given to me at my 
birth, and upon exquisite health. Up to the age of two, and 
almost through that entire space of twenty-four months, I had 
suffered from ague; but when that left me, all germs and traces 
of ill health fled away forever, except only such (and those how 
curable!) as I inherited from my school-boy distresses in Lon- 
don, or had created by means of opium. Even the long ague 
was not without ministrations of favor to my prevailing tem- 
per; and, on the whole, no subject for pity, since naturally it 
won for me the sweet caresses of female tenderness, both young 
and old. I was a little petted ; but you see by this time, reader, 
that I must have been too much of a philosopher, even in the 
year one ab urbe condita of my frail earthly tenement, to abuse 
such indulgence. It also won for me a ride on horseback 
whenever the weather permitted. I was placed on a pillow, in 
front of a cankered old man, upon a large white horse, not so 
young as I was, but still showing traces of blood. And even 
the old man, who was both the oldest and the worst of the 



126 DE QUINCEY 

three, talked with gentleness to myself, reserving his surliness 
for all the rest of the world. 

These things pressed with a gracious power of incubation 
upon my predispositions; and in my overflowing love I did 
things fitted to make the reader laugh, and sometimes fitted 
to bring myself into perplexity. One instance from a thou- 
sand may illustrate the combination of both effects. At four 
years old, I had repeatedly seen the housemaid raising her long 
broom, and pursuing (generally destroying) a vagrant spider. 
The holiness of all life, in my eyes, forced me to devise plots for 
saving the poor doomed wretch; and thinking intercession 
likely to prove useless, my policy was, to draw ofif the house- 
maid on pretence of showing her a picture, until the spider, 
already en route, should have had time to escape. Very soon, 
however, the shrewd housemaid, marking the coincidence of 
these picture exhibitions with the agonies of fugitive spiders, 
detected my strategem; so that, if the reader will pardon an 
expression borrowed from the street, henceforwards the pic- 
ture was " no go." However, as she approved of my motive, 
she told me of the many murders that the spider had com- 
mitted, and next (which was worse) of the many that he cer- 
tainly would commit, if reprieved. This staggered me. I 
could have gladly forgiven the past, but it did seem a false 
mercy to spare one spider in order to scatter death amongst 
fifty flies. I thought timidly, for a moment, of suggesting that 
people sometimes repented, and 'that he might repent; but I 
checked myself, on considering that I had never read any 
account, and that she might laugh at the idea, of a penitent 
spider. To desist was a necessity, in these circumstances. 
But the difficulty which the housemaid had suggested did not 
depart; it troubled my musing mind to perceive that the welfare 
of one creature might stand upon the ruin of another; and the 
case of the spider remaining thenceforwards ever more per- 
plexing to my understanding than it was painful to my heart. 

The reader is likely to differ from me upon the question, 
moved by recurring to such experiences of childhood, whether 
much value attaches to the perceptions and intellectual 
glimpses of a child. Children, like men, range through a 
gamut that is infinite, of temperaments and characters, ascend- 
ing from the very dust below our feet to highest heaven. I 
have seen children that were sensual, brutal, devilish. But, 
thanks be to the vis medicatrix of human nature, and to the 
goodness of God, these are as rare exhibitions as all other mon- 
sters. People thought, when seeing such odious travesties 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 127 

and burlesques upon lovely human infancy, that perhaps the 
little wretches might be Kilcrops. Yet, possibly (it has since 
occurred to me), even these children of the fiend, as they 
seemed, might have one chord in their horrible natures that 
answered to the call of some subhme purpose. There is a 
mimic instance of this kind, often found amongst ourselves in 
natures that are not really " horrible," but which seem such to 
persons viewing them from a station not sufficiently central : — 
Always there are mischievous boys in a neighborhood, — boys 
who tie canisters to the tails of cats belonging to ladies, — a 
thing which greatly I disapprove; and who rob orchards, — a 
thing which slightly I disapprove; and, behold! the next day, 
on meeting the injured ladies, they say to me, " O, my dear 
friend, never pretend to argue for him! This boy, we shall all 
see, will come to be hanged." Well, that seems a disagreeable 
prospect for all parties; so I change the subject; and, lo! five 
years later, there is an English frigate fighting with a frigate of 
heavier metal (no matter of what nation). The noble captain 
has manoeuvred as only his countrymen can manoeuvre; he has 
delivered his broadsides as only the proud islanders can deliver 
them. Suddenly he sees the opening for a coup-de-main; 
through his speaking-trumpet he shouts, " Where are my 
boarders?" And instantly rise upon the deck, with the gayety 
of boyhood, in white shirt-sleeves bound with black ribands, 
fifty men, the elite of the crew; and, behold! at the very head of 
them, cutlass in hand, is our friend, the tier of canisters to the 
tails of ladies' cats, — a thing which greatly I disapprove, and 
also the robber of orchards, — a thing which slightly I disap- 
prove. But here is a man that will not sufifer you either greatly 
or sHghtly to disapprove him. Fire celestial burns in his eye; 
his nation — his glorious nation — is in his mind, himself he 
regards no more than the life of a cat, or the ruin of a canister. 
On the deck of the enemy he throws himself- with rapture, and 
if he is amongst the killed, — if he, for an object so gloriously 
unselfish, lays down with joy his life and glittering youth, — 
mark this, that, perhaps, he will not be the least in heaven. 

But coming back to the case of childhood, I maintain stead- 
fastly that into all the elementary feelings of man children look 
with more searching gaze than adults. My opinion is, that 
where circumstances favor, where the heart is deep, where 
humility and tenderness exist in strength, where the situation is 
favourable as to solitude and as to genial feelings, children have 
a specific power of contemplating the truth, which departs as 
they enter the world. It is clear to me, that children, upon 



128 DE QUINCEY 

elementary paths which require no knowledge of the world to 
unravel, tread more firmly than men; have a more pathetic 
sense of the beauty which lies in justice; and, according to the 
immortal ode of our great laureate " On the Intimations of 
Immortality in Childhood," a far closer communion with 
God. I, if you observe, do not much intermeddle with religion, 
properly so called. My path lies on the interspace between 
religion and philosophy, that connects them both. Yet here, 
for once, I shall trespass on grounds not properly mine, and 
desire you to observe in St. Matthew, chapter xxi., and verse 
15, who were those that, crying in the temple, made the first 
public recognition of Qiristianity. Then, if you say, " O, but 
children echo- what they hear, and are no independent authori- 
ties." I must request you to extend your reading into verse 16, 
where you will find that the testimony of these children, as 
bearing an original value was ratified by the highest testimony; 
and the recognition of these children did itself receive a heav- 
enly recognition. And this could not have been, unless there 
were children in Jerusalem who saw into truth with a far 
sharper eye than Sanhedrims and Rabbis. 

It is impossible, with respect to any memorable grief, that 
it can be adequately exhibited so as to indicate the enormity of 
the convulsion which really it caused, without viewing it under 
a variety of aspects, — a thing which is here almost necessary for 
the effect of proportion to what follows : first, for instance, in its 
immediate pressure, so stunning and confounding; secondly, 
in its oscillations, as in its earlier agitations, frantic with 
tumults, that borrow the wings of the winds; or in its diseased 
impulses of sick, languishing desire, through which sorrow 
transforms itself to a sunny angel, that beckons us to a sweet 
repose. These phases of revolving affection I have already 
sketched. And I shall also sketch a third, that is, where the 
affliction, seemingly hushing itself to sleep, suddenly soars 
upwards again upon combining with another mode of sorrow, 
namely, anxiety without definite limits, and the trouble of a 
reproaching conscience. As sometimes," upon the EngHsh 
lakes, water-fowl that have careered in the air until the eye is 
wearied with the eternal wheeHngs of their inimitable flight — 
Grecian simplicities of motion, amidst a labyrinthine infinity of 
curves that would baffle the geometry of Apollonius — seek 
the water at last, as if with some settled purpose (you imagine) 
of reposing. Ah, how little have you understood the omnipo- 
tence of that life which they inherit! They want no rest: they 
laugh at resting; all is *' make believe," as when an infant hides 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 129 

its laughing face behind its mother's shawl. For a moment it 
is still Is it meaning to rest? Will its impatient heart endure 
to lurk there for long? Ask, rather, if a cataract will stop 
from fatigue. Will a sunbeam sleep on its travels? or he 
Atlantic rest from its labours? As little can the infant, as little 
can the water-fowl of the lakes, suspend their play, except as 
a variety of play, or rest unless when nature compels them. 
Suddenly starts off the infant, suddenly ascend the birds, to 
new evolutions as incalculable as the caprices of a kaleidoscope; 
and the glory of their motions, from the mixed immortalities 
of beauty and inexhaustible variety, becomes at least pathetic 
to survey. So also, and with such life of variation, do the 
primary convulsions of nature — such, perhaps, as only 
primary" formations in the human system can experience — 
come round again and again by reverberating shocks. 

The new intercourse with my guardian, and the changes ot 
scene which naturally it led to, were of use in weaning my mjnd 
from the mere disease which threatened it in case I had been 
left any longer to my total solitude. But out of these changes 
grew an incident which restored my grief, though in a more 
troubled shape, and now for the first time associated with 
something like remorse and deadly anxiety. I can safely say 
that this was my earliest trespass, and perhaps a vernal one, all 
things considered. Nobody ever discovered it; and but tor 
mv own frankness it would not be known to this day. But 
that I could not know; and for years,— that is, from seven or 
earlier up to ten,— such was my simphcity, that I lived in 
constant terror. This, though it revived my grief, did me 
probably great service; because it was no longer a state of lan- 
guishing desire tending to torpor, but of feverish irritation and 
Inawing care, that kept alive the activity of my understanding. 
The case was this: It happened that I had now, and com- 
mencing with my first introduction to Latin studies, a large 
weekly allowance of pocket money,— too large for my age, but 
safely intrusted to myself, who never spent or desired to spend 
one fraction of it upon anything but books. But all proved 
too little for my colossal schemes. Had the Vatican, the Bod- 
leian and the Bibliotheque du Roi, been all emptied into one 
collection, for my private gratification, little progress would 
have been made towards content in this particular craving. 
Very soon I had run ahead of my allowance, and was about 
three guineas deep in debt. There I paused; for deep anxiety 
now began to oppress me as to the course in which this mys- 
terious (and indeed guilty) current of debt would finally flow. 



130 DE QUINCEY 

For the present it was frozen up; but I had some reason for 
thinking that Christmas thawed all debts whatsoever, and set 
them in motion towards innumerable pockets. Now my debt 
would be thawed with all the rest; and in what direction would 
it flow? There was no river that would carry it of¥ to sea; to 
somebody's pocket it would beyond a doubt make its way and 
who was that somebody? This question haunted me forever. 
Christmas had come, Christmas had gone, and I heard nothing 
of the three guineas. But I was not easier for that. Far rather 
I would have heard of it; for this indefinite approach of a 
loitering catastrophe gnawed and fretted my feelings. No 
Grecian audience ever waited with more shuddering horror for 
the anagnorisis" of the Oedipus, than I for the explosion of my 
debt. Had I been less ignorant, I should have proposed to 
mortgage my weekly allowance for the debt, or to form a 
sinking fund for redeeming it; for the weekly sum was nearly 
five per cent on the entire debt. But I had a mysterious awe 
of ever alluding to it. This arose from my want of some con- 
fidential friend; whilst my grief pointed continually to the 
remembrance, that so it had not always been. But was not the 
bookseller to blame in sufifering a child scarcely seven years 
old to contract such a debt? Not in the least. He was both 
a rich man, who could not possibly care for my trifling custom, 
and notoriously an honourable man. Indeed, the money which 
I myself spent every week in books would reasonably have 
caused him to presume that so small a sum as three guineas 
might well be authorized by my family. He stood, however, 
on plainer ground; for my guardian, who was very indolent 
(as people chose to call it), — that is, like his little melancholy 
ward, spent all his time in reading, — often enough would send 
me to the bookseller's with a written order for books. This 
was to prevent my forgetting. But when he found that such 
a thing as " forgetting," in the case of a book, was wholly out 
of the question for me, the trouble of writing was dismissed^ 
And thus I had become factor-general, on the part of my 
guardian, both for his books, and for such as were wanted 
on my own account, in the natural course of my education. 
My private " little account " had therefore in fact flowed home- 
wards at Christmas, not (as I anticipated) in the shape of an 
independent current, but as a little tributary rill, that was lost 
in the waters of some more important river. This I now know, 
but could not then have known with any certainty. So far, 
however, the affair would gradually have sunk out of my 
anxieties as time wore on. But there was another item in the 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS I3I 

case, which, from the excess of my ignorance preyed upon my 
spirits far more keenly; and this, keeping f^^^^ /^^f' ^^P^^ ^^^^^, 
the other incident aUve. With respect to the debt, I was not 
so ignorant as to think it of much danger by the mere 
amount,— my own allowance furnished a scale for preventing 
that mistake; -it was the principle,- the havmg presumed to 
contract debts on my own account,— that I feared to have 
exposed But this other case was a ground for anxiety, even 
as regarded the amount; not really, but under the jesting rep- 
resentation made to me, which I (as ever before and after) swal- 
lowed in perfect faith. Amongst the books which i had 
bought all English, was a history of Great Britain, commenc- 
ing of course, with Brutus and a thousand years of impossi- 
bilities; these fables being generously thrown in as a little 
gratuitous extra to the mass of truths which were to follow. 
This was to be completed in sixty or eighty parts, I believe. 
But there was another work left more indefinite as to its ulti- 
mate extent, and which, from its nature, seemed to imply a 
far higher range. It was a general history of navigation sup- 
ported by a vast body of voyages. Now, when I considered 
with myself what a huge thing the sea was, and that so many 
thousands of captains, commodores, admirals, were eternally 
running up and down it, and scoring Hnes upon its face so 
rankly, that in some of the main *' streets " and squares (as 
one might call them), their tracts would blend into one undis- 
tinguishable blot, I began to fear that such a work tended to 
inffnitv. What was little England to the universal sea? And 
vet that went perhaps to fourscore parts. Not enduring the 
uncertainty that now besieged my tranquillity, I resolved to 
know the worst; and, on a day ever memorable to me, 1 went 
down to the bookseller's. He was a mild, elderly man, and to 
myself had always shown a kind, indulgent manner. Part y, 
perhaps, he had been struck by my extreme gravity; and partly, 
during the many conversations had with him, on occasion ot 
my guardian's orders for books, with my laughable simphcity. 
But there was another reason which had early won for me his 
paternal regard. For the first three or four months I had 
found Latin something of a drudgery; and the incident which 
forever knocked away the " shores," at that time preventing my 
launch upon the general bosom of Latin literature was this: 
One day the bookseller took down a Beza's Latin Testament; 
and opening it, asked me to translate for him the chapter 
which he pointed to. I was struck by perceiving that it was 
the great chapter of St. Paul on the grave and resurrection. 1 



132 DE QUINCEY 

had never seen a Latin version ; yet, from the simpUcity of the 
scriptural style in any translation (though Beza's is far from 
good), I could not well have failed in construing. But, as it 
happened to be this particular chapter, which in English I had 
read again and again with so passionate a sense of its grandeur, 
I read it off with a fluency and effect like some great opera 
singer uttering a rapturous bravura. My kind old friend 
expressed himself gratified, making me a present of the book 
as a mark of his approbation. And it is remarkable, that from 
this moment, when the deep memory of the English words had 
forced me into seeing the precise correspondence of the two 
concurrent streams, — Latin and English, — never again did 
any difficulty arise to check the velocity of my progress in this 
particular language. At less than eleven years of age, when as 
yet I was a very indifferent Grecian, I had become a brilliant 
master of Latinity, as my alcaics and choriambics remain to 
testify; and the whole occasion of a change so memorable to a 
boy, was this casual summons to translate a composition with 
which my heart was filled. Ever after this he showed me a 
caressing kindness, and so condescendingly, that, generally, he 
would leave any people, for a moment, with whom he was 
engaged, to come and speak to me. On this fatal day, how- 
ever, — for such it proved to me, — he could not do this. He 
saw me, indeed, and nodded, but could not leave a party of 
elderly strangers. This accident threw me unavoidably upon 
one of his young people. Now, this was a market day, and 
there was a press of country people present, whom I did not 
wish to hear my question. Never did a human creature, with 
his heart palpitating at Delphi for the solution of some killing 
mystery, stand before the priestess of the oracle, with lips that 
moved more sadly than mine, when now advancing to a smiling 
young man at a desk. His answer was to decide, though I 
could not exactly know that, whether, for the next two years, I 
was to have an hour of peace. He was a handsome, good- 
natured young man, but full of fun and frolic; and I dare say 
was amused with what must have seemed to him the absurd 
anxiety of my features. I described the work to him, and he 
understood me at once. How many volumes did he think it 
would extend to? There was a whimsical expression, perhaps, 
of drollery about his eyes, but which, unhappily, under my pre- 
conceptions, I translated into scorn, as he replied: "How 
many volumes? O! really, I can't say; maybe a matter of 
fifteen thousand, be the same more or less." " More? " I said, 
in horror, altogether neglecting the contingency of " less." 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 133 

" Whv " he said, '' we can settle these things to a nix:ety. But 

of pointing attention to myself as one that oy nav g p 

could put r,«™3:lf;etog eve.^ nook of every town and 
nay, even m darkness, ^^^"^^^"'"f ^\ J^j I had some dim 



134 I>E QUINCEY 

men with unknown chastisements, for offences equally 
unknown; nay, to myself, absolutely inconceivable. Could I 
be the mysterious criminal so long pointed out, as it were, in 
prophecy? I figured the stationers, doubtless all powerful 
men, pulling at one rope, and my unhappy self hanging at the 
other end. But an image, which seems now even more ludi- 
crous than the rest, at that time, was the one most connected 
with the revival of my grief. It occurred to my subtlety, that 
the Stationers' Company, or any other company, could not 
possibly demand the money until they had delivered the vol- 
umes. And, as no man could say that I had ever positively 
refused to receive them, they would have no pretence for not 
accomplishing this delivery in a civil manner. Unless I should 
turn out to be no customer at all, at present it was clear that 
I had a right to be considered a most excellent customer; one, 
in fact, who had given an order for fifteen thousand volumes. 
Then rose up before me this great opera-house *' scena " of the 
delivery. There would be a ring at the front door. A wag- 
oner in the front, with a bland voice, would ask for " a young 
gentleman who had given an order to their house." Looking 
out, I should perceive a procession of carts and wagons, all 
advancing in measured movements; each in turn would pre- 
sent its rear, deliver its cargo of volumes, by shooting them, 
like a load of coals, on the lawn, and wheel off to the rear, 
by way of clearing the road for its successors. Then the 
impossibility of even asking the servants to cover with sheets, 
or counterpanes, or table-cloths, such a mountainous, such a 
" star-y-pointing " record of my past offences, lying in so con- 
spicuous a situation! Men would not know my guilt merely, 
they would see it. But the reason why this form of the con- 
sequences, so much more than any other, stuck by my imag- 
ination was, that it connected itself with one of the " Arabian 
Nights " which had particularly interested myself and my sister. 
It was that tale, where a young porter, having his ropes about 
his person, had stumbled into the special " preserve " of some 
old magician. He finds a beautiful lady imprisoned, to whom 
(and not without prospects of success) he recommends himself 
as a suitor more in harmony with her own years than a with- 
ered magician. At this crisis, the magician returns. The 
young man bolts, and for that day successfully; but unluckily 
he leaves his ropes behind. Next morning he hears the magi- 
cian, too honest by half, inquiring at the front door, with much 
expression of condolence, for the unfortunate young man who 
had lost his ropes in his own zenana. Upon this story I used 



I 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 135 

to amuse my sister by ventriloquizing to the magician, from 
the lips of the trembling young man, — " O, Mr. Magician, 
these ropes cannot be mine! They are far too good; and one 
wouldn't like, you know, to rob some other poor young man. 
If you please, Mr. Magician, I never had money enough to 
buy so beautiful a set of ropes." But argument is thrown 
away upon a magician, and off he sets on his travels with the 
young porter, not forgetting to take the ropes along with him. 

Here now was the case, that had once seemed so impressive 
to me in a mere fiction from a far distant age and land, literally 
reproduced in myself. For, what did 'it matter whether a 
magician dunned one with old ropes for his engine of torture, 
or Stationers' Hall with fifteen thousand volumes (in the rear 
of which there might also be ropes)? Should I have ventrilo- 
quized, would my sister have laughed, had either of us but 
guessed the possibility that I myself, and within one twelve 
months, and, alas! standing alone in the world as regarded 
confidential counsel, should repeat within my own inner expe- 
rience the shadowy panic of the young Bagdat intruder upon 
the privacy of magicians? It appeared, then, that I had been 
reading a legend concerning myself in the " Arabian Nights." I 
had been contemplated in types a thousand years before, on 
the banks of the Tigris. It was horror and grief that promoted 
that thought. 

O, heavens! that the misery of a child should by possibility 
become the laughter of adults! — that even I, the sufiferer, 
should be capable of amusing myself, as if it had been a jest, 
with what for three years had constituted the secret affliction 
of my life, and its eternal trepidation — like the ticking of a 
death-watch to patients lying awake in the plague! I durst 
ask no counsel; there was no one to ask. Possibly my sister 
could have given me none in a case which neither of us should 
have understood, and where to seek for information from 
others would have been at once to betray the whole reason for 
seeking it. But, if no advice, she would have given me her 
pity, and the expression of her endless love; and, with the 
relief of sympathy, that heals for a season all distresses, she 
would have given me that exquisite luxury — the knowledge 
that, having parted with my secret, yet also I had not parted 
with it, since it was in the power only of one that could much 
less betray me than I could betray myself. At this time, — 
that is, about the year when I suffered most, — I was reading 
Caesar. O, laurelled scholar, sunbright intellect, "foremost 
man of all this world," how often did I make out of thy 



136 DE QUINCEY 

immortal volume a pillow to support my wearied brow, as at 
evening, on my homeward road, I used to turn into some 
silent field, where I might give way unobserved to the reveries 
which besieged me! I wondered, and found no end of won- 
dering, at the revolution that one short year had made in my 
happiness. I wondered that such billows could overtake me. 
At the beginning of that year, how radiantly happy! At the 
end, how insupportably alone! 

" Into what depth thou seest, 
From what height fallen." 

Forever I searched the abysses with some wandering 
thoughts unintelligible to myself. Forever I dallied with 
some obscure notion, how my sister's love might be made in 
some dim way available for delivering me from misery; or 
else how the misery I had suffered and was suffering might 
be made, in some way equally dim, the ransom for winning 
back her love. 

Here pause, reader! Imagine yourself seated in some 
cloud-scaling swing, oscillating under the impulse of lunatic 
hands; for the strength of lunacy may belong to human 
dreams, the fearful caprice of lunacy, and the malice of lunacy, 
whilst the victim of those dreams may be all the more cer- 
tainly removed from lunacy; even as a bridge gathers cohesion 
and strength from the increasing resistance into which it is 
forced by increasing pressure. Seated in such a swing, fast 
as you reach the lowest point of depression, may you rely on 
racing up to a starry altitude of corresponding ascent. Ups 
and downs you will see, heights and depths, in our fiery course 
together, such as will sometimes tempt you to look shyly and 
suspiciously at me, your guide, and the ruler of the oscilla- 
tions. Here, at the point where I have called a halt, the 
reader has reached the lowest depths in my nursery afflictions. 
From that point, according to the principles of art which gov- 
ern the movement of these Confessions, I had meant to launch 
him upwards through the whole arch of ascending visions 
which seemed requisite to balance the sweep downwards, so 
recently described in his course. But accidents of the press 
have made it impossible to accomplish this purpose in the 
present month's journal. There is reason to regret that the 
advantages of position, which were essential to the full effect 
of passages planned for the equipoise and mutual resistance, 
have thus been lost. Meantime, upon the principle of the 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 1 37 

mariner, who rigs a jury-mast in default of his regular spars, 
I find my resource in a sort of " jury " peroration, not sufficient 
in the way of a balance by its proportions, but sufficient to 
indicate the quality of the balance which I had contemplated. 
He who has really read the preceding parts of these present 
Confessions will be aware that a stricter scrutiny of the past, 
such as was natural after the whole economy of the dreaming 
faculty had been convulsed beyond all precedents on record, 
led me to the conviction that not one agency, but two agen- 
cies, had cooperated to the tremendous result. The nursery 
experience had been the ally and the natural coefficient of 
the opium. For that reason it was that the nursery experience 
has been narrated. Logically it bears the very same relation 
to the convulsions of the dreaming faculty as the opium. The 
idealizing tendency existed in the dream-theatre of my child- 
hood; but the preternatural strength of its action and colouring 
was first developed after the confluence of the two causes. 
The reader must suppose me at Oxford; twelve and a half 
years are gone by; I am in the glory of youthful happiness: 
but I have now first tampered with opium; and now first the 
agitations of my childhood reopened in strength, now first 
they swept in upon the brain with power, and the grandeur 
of recovered life, under the separate and the concurring inspi- 
rations of opium. 

Once again, after twelve years' interval, the nursery of my 
childhood expanded before me: my sister was moaning in 
bed; I was beginning to be restless with fears not intelligible 
to myself. Once again the nurse, but now dilated to colossal 
proportions, stood as upon some Grecian stage with her 
uplifted hand, and like the superb Medea standing alone with 
her children in the nursery at Corinth,^^ smote me senseless 
to the ground. Again I was in the chamber with my sister's 
corpse, again the pomps of life rose up in silence, the glory of 
summer, the frost of death. Dream formed itself mysteriously 
within dream; within these Oxford dreams remoulded itself 
continually the trance in my sister's chamber, — the blue 
heavens, the everlasting vault, the soaring billows, the throne 
steeped in the thought (but not the sight) of " Him that sate 
thereon; " the flight, the pursuit, the irrecoverable steps of my 
return to earth. Once more the funeral procession gathered; 
the priest in his white surplice stood waiting with a book in 
his hand by the side of an open grave, the sacristan with his 
shovel; the coffin sank; the dust to dust descended. Again 
I was in the church on a heavenly Sunday morning. The 



138 DE QUINCEY 

golden sunlight of God slept amongst the heads of his apos- 
tles, his martyrs, his saints; the fragment from the litany, the 
fragment from the clouds, awoke again the lawny beds that 
went up to scale the heavens — awoke again the shadowy arms 
that moved downward to meet them. Once again arose the 
swell of the anthem, the burst of the Hallelujah chorus, the 
storm, the trampling movement of the choral passion, the agi- 
tation of my own trembling sympathy, the tumult of the choir, 
the wrath of the organ. Once more I, that wallowed, became 
he that rose up to the clouds. And now in Oxford all was 
bound up into unity; the first state and the last were melted 
into each other as in some sunny glorifying haze. For high 
above my own station hovered a gleaming host of heavenly 
beings, surrounding the pillows of the dying children. And 
such beings sympathize equally with sorrow that grovels and 
with sorrow that soars. Such beings pity alike the children 
that are languishing in death, and the children that live only 
to languish in tears. 

Notes 

^ Cicero, in a well-known passage of his Ethics, speaks of trade as 
irredeemably base, if petty; but as not so absolutely felonious, if whole- 
sale. He gives a real merchant (one who is such in the English 
sense) leave to think himself a shade above small beer. 

' Her medical attendants were Dr. Percival, a well-known literary 
physician, who had been a correspondent of Condorcet, D'Alembert, 
etc., and Mr. Charles White, a very distinguished surgeon. It was he 
who pronounced her head to be the finest in its structure and develop- 
ment of any that he had ever seen, — an assertion which, to my own 
knowledge, he repeated in after years, and with enthusiasm. That he 
had some acquaintance with the subject may be presumed from this, 
that he wrote and published a work on the human skull, supported by 
many measurements which he had made of heads selected from all 
varieties of the human species. Meantime, as I would be loath that 
any trait of what might seem vanity should creep into this record, 
I will candidly admit that she died of hydrocephalus; and it has been 
often supposed that the premature expansion of the intellect in cases 
of that class is altogether morbid, — forced on, in fact, by the mere 
stimulation of the disease. I would, however, suggest, as a possi- 
bility, the very inverse order of relation between the disease and the 
intellectual manifestations. Not the disease may always have caused 
the preternatural growth of the intellect; but, on the contrary, this 
growth coming on spontaneously and outrunning the capacities of the 
physical structure, may have caused the disease. 

^ Among the oversights in the " Paradise Lost," some of which have 
not yet been perceived, it is certainly one — that, by placing in such 
overpowering light of pathos the sublime sacrifice of Adam to his 
love for his frail companion, he has too much lowered the guilt of his 
disobedience to God. All that Milton can say afterwards does not, 
and cannot, obscure the beauty of that action; reviewing it calmly, we 



STJSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS I 39 

condemn, but taking the impassioned station of Adam at the moment 
of temptation, we approve in our hearts. This was certainly an over- 
sight; but it was one very difftcult to redress. I remember, amongst 
the many exquisite thoughts of John Paul Richter, one which strikes 
me as particularly touching, upon this subject. He suggests not as 
any grave theological comment, but as the wandering fancy of a 
poetic heart, that, had Adam conquered the anguish of separation as 
a pure sacrifice of obedience to God, his reward would have been the 
pardon and reconciliation of Eve, together with her restoration to 
innocence. 

* " I stood in unimaginable trance 

And agony, which cannot be remembered."* 

•^"Everlasting Jew! "— der ewige Jude — which is the common 
German expression for " The Wandering Jew," and sublimer even than 
our own. 

"The reader must not forget, in reading this and other passages, 
that, though a child's feelings are spoken of, it is not the child who 
speaks. I decipher what the child only felt in cipher. And so far is 
this distinction or this explanation from pointing to anything meta- 
physical or doubtful, that a man must be grossly unobservant who is 
not aware of what I am here noticing, not as a peculiarity of this child 
or that, but as a necessity of all children. Whatsoever in a man's 
mind blossoms and expands to his own consciousness in mature life, 
must have preexisted in germ during his infancy. I, for instance, did 
not, as a child, consciously read in my own deep feelings these ideas. 
No, not at all; nor was it possible for a child to do so. I, the child, 
had the feelings; I, the manj decipher them. In the child lay the 
handwriting mysterious to him; in me, the interpretation and the 

comment. , .,. i • r 

^ I except, however, one case, — the case of a child dying ot an 
organic disorder, so, therefore, as to die slowly, and aware of its own 
condition. Because such a child is solemnized, and sometimes, in a 
partial sense, inspired, — inspired by the depth of its sufferings, and 
by the awfulness of its prospect. Such a child, having put off the 
earthly mind in many things, may naturally have put off the childish 
mind in all things. I thereby, speaking for myself only, acknowledge 
to have read with emotion a record of a little girl, who, knowing her- 
self for months to be amongst the elect of death, became anxious, even 
to sickness of heart, for what she called the conversion of her father. 
Her filial duty and reverence had been swallowed up in filial love. 

* " Death of Wallenstein." Act v. Scene i (Coleridge's Translation), 
relating to his remembrances of the younger Piccolomini. 

"See the Second Book of Kings, chapter xiii: 20 and 21. Thirty 
years ago this impressive incident was made the subject of a large 
altar-piece by Mr. Allston, an interesting American artist, then 
resident in London. 

"Thirty years ago it would not have been necessary to say one 
word of the Obi or Obeah magic; because at that time several distin- 
guished writers (Miss Edgeworth. for. instance, in her " Belinda " ), had 
made use of this superstition in fiction, and because the remarkable 
history of "Three-fingered Jack," a story brought upon the stage, 
had made the superstition notorious as a fact. However, so long 

*Speech of Alhadra, in Coleridge's " Remorse." 



I40 DE QUINCEY 

after the case has probably passed out of the public mind, it may be 
proper to mention, that when an Obeah man — that is, a professor of 
this dark collusion with human fears and human credulity — had once 
woven his dreadful net of ghostly terrors, and had thrown it over his 
selected victim, vainly did that victim flutter, struggle, languish in the 
meshes, unless the spells were reversed, he generally perished; and 
without a wound, except from his own too domineering fancy, 

" What follows, I think (for book I have none of any kind when 
this paper is proceeding), namely: '' et sera sub nocte rudentum," is 
probably a mistake of Virgil's; the lions did not roar because night 
was approaching, but because night brought with it their principal 
meal, and consequently the impatience of hunger. 

^" In this place I derive my feeling partly from a lovely sketch of 
the appearance, in verse, by Mr. Wordsworth; partly from, my own 
experience of the case; and, not having the poems here, I know not 
how to proportion my acknowledgments. 

""And so, then," the cynic objects, "you rank your own mind 
(and you tell us so frankly) amongst the primary formations? " As I 
love to annoy him, it would give me pleasure to reply — " Perhaps I 
do." But as I never answer more questions than are necessary, I 
confine myself to saying, that this is not a necessary construction of 
the words. Some minds stand nearer to the type of the original nature 
in man, are truer than others to the great magnet in our dark planet. 
Minds that are impassioned on a more colossal scale than ordinary, 
deeper in their vibrations, and more extensive in the scale of their 
vibrations, whether in other parts of their intellectual system, they had 
or had not a corresponding compass, will tremble to greater depths 
from a fearful convulsion, and will come round by a longer curve of 
undulations. 

"That is (as on account of English readers is added), the recogni- 
tion of his true identity, which, in one moment, and by a horrid flash 
of revelation, connects him with acts incestuous, murderous, parricidal 
in the past, and with a mysterious fatality of woe lurking in the 
future. 
" Euripides. 



Ill 



THE PALIMPSEST 



YOU know perhaps, masculine reader, better than I can tell 
you, what is a Palimpsest. Possibly, you have one in 
your own library. But yet, for the sake of others who 
may not know, or may have forgotten, suffer me to 
explain it here, lest any female reader, who honours these 
papers with her notice, should tax me with explaining it once 
too seldom ; which would be worse to bear than a simultaneous 
complaint from twelve proud men, that I had explained it three 
times too often. You therefore, fair reader, understand, that for 
your accommodation exclusively, I explain the meaning of this 
word. It is Greek; and our sex enjoys the office and privilege 
of standing counsel to yours, in all questions of Greek. We are, 
under favour, perpetual and hereditary dragomans to you. So 
that if, by accident, you know the meaning of a Greek word, 
yet by courtesy to us, your counsel learned in that matter, you 
will always seem not to know it. 

A palimpsest, then, is a membrane or roll cleansed of its 
manuscript by reiterated successions. 

What was the reason that the Greeks and the Romans had 
not the advantage of printed books? The answer will be, 
from ninety-nine persons in a hundred: Because the mystery 
of printing was not then discovered. But this is altogether 
a mistake. The secret of printing must have been discovered 
many thousands of times before it was used, or could be used. 
The inventive powers of man are divine; and also his stupid- 
ity is divine, as Cowper so playfully illustrates in the slow 
development of the sofa through successive generations of 
immortal dulness. It took centuries of blockheads to raise a 
joint stool into a chair; and it required something like a 
miracle of genius, in the estimate of elder generations, to 
reveal the possibility of lengthening a chair into a chaise- 
longue, or a sofa. Yes, these were inventions that cost mighty 
throes of intellectual power. But still, as respects printing, 
and admirable as is the stupidity of man, it was really not 
quite equal to the task of evading an object which stared him 

141 



142 DE QUINCEY 

in the face with so broad a gaze. It did not require an 
Athenian intellect to read the main secret of printing in many- 
scores of processes which the ordinary uses of life were daily 
repeating. To say nothing of analogous artifices amongst 
various mechanic artisans, all that is essential in printing must 
have been known to every nation that struck coins and medals. 
Not therefore, any want of a printing art, — that is of an art 
for multiplying impressions, — but the want of a cheap material 
for receiving such impressions, was the obstacle to an intro- 
duction of printed books, even as early as Pisistratus. The 
ancients did apply printing to records of silver and gold; to 
marble, and many other substances cheaper than gold and 
silver, they did not, since each monument required a separate 
effort of inscription. Simply this defect it was of a cheap 
material for receiving impresses, which froze in its very foun- 
tains the early resources of printing. 

Some twenty years ago, this view of the case was luminously 
expounded by Dr. Whately, the present Archbishop of Dub- 
lin, and with the merit, I believe, of having first suggested it. 
Since then, this theory has received indirect confirmation. 
Now, out of that original scarcity affecting all materials proper 
for durable books, which continued up to times comparatively 
modern, grew the opening for palimpsests. Naturally, when 
once a roll of parchment or of vellum had done its office, by 
propagating through a series of generations what once had 
possessed an interest for them, but which, under changes of 
opinion or of taste, had faded to their feelings or had become 
obsolete for their undertakings, the whole membrana or vellum 
skin, the two-fold product of human skill, costly material, and 
costly freight of thought, which it carried, drooped in value 
concurrently — supposing that each were inalienably asso- 
ciated to the other. Once it had been the impress of a human 
mind which stamped its value upon the vellum; the vellum, 
though costly, had contributed but a secondary element of 
value to the total result. At length, however, this relation 
between the vehicle and its freight has gradually been under- 
mined. The vellum, from having been the setting of the 
jewel, has risen at length to be the jewel itself; and the burden 
of thought, from having given the chief value to the vellum, 
has now become the chief obstacle to its value; nay, has 
totally extinguished its value, unless it can be dissociated from 
the connection. Yet, if this unlinking can be efifected, then, 
fast as the inscription upon the membrane is sinking into rub- 
bish, the membrane itself is reviving in its separate import- 



I 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 143 

ance; and, from bearing a ministerial value, the vellum has 
come at last to absorb the whole value. 

Hence the importance for our ancestors that the separation 
should be effected. Hence it arose in the middle ages, as a 
cons derable object for chemistry, to discharge the writing 
from the roll, ai d thus to make it available for a new succes- 
sion of thoughts. The soil, if cleansed from what once had 
been hot* oui plants, but now were held to be weeds would 
be ready to receive a fresh and more appropriate crop. In 
that object the monkish chemist succeeded; but after a fashion 
whth eemed almost incredible,- incredible not as regards 
Te extent of their success, but as regards the delicacy of 
etra^s under which it moved,- so equally adjusted was 
heir success to the immediate interests of that period and^to 
the reversionary objects of our own. They did the thing, 
but not so radially as to prevent. us, their. P-terity. from 
undoing it. They expelled the writing sufficiently to leave a 
field S? the new manuscript, and yet not sufficiently to make 
the traces of the elder manuscript irrecoverable for us Could 
magic, could Hermes Trismegistus, have done more? What 
would you think, fair reader, of a problem such as this,- to 
wri^e a book which should be sense for your own generation 
nonsense for the next, should revive into ^ense for the next 
after that, but again become nonsense for the fourth, and so 
on by alternate successions, sinking into night or blazing into 
day.^like the Sicilian river Arethusa, and the English river 
Mole- or like the undulating motions of a flattened stone 
rhich children cause to skim the breast of a ".ver, now diving 
below the water, now grazing its surface, sinking heavily nto 
darkness, rising buoyantly into light, through a 1°"? vista o 
alternations? Such a problem you say, is 'JpP^^^'bk. ^ut 
reallv it is a problem not harder apparently than — to bid a 
generation kill, but so that a subsequent generation may call 
back into life; bury, but so that posterity may command to 
rise aga°n. Yet ttat was what the rude chemistry of past 
ages effected when coming into combination with the reaction 
from the more refined chemistry of our o^vn. Had they been 
better chemists, had we been worse, the mixed result- "amely 
that dying for them, the flower should revive for us, could 
not have been effected. They did the thing proposed o them 
they did it effectually, for they founded "PO" '*/" *^* ^^' 
wanted; and yet ineffectually, since we unravelled their work 
racing all above which they had superscribed; restoring all 
below which they had effaced. 



144 ^^ QUINCEY 

Here, for instance, is a parchment which contained some 
Grecian trag"edy, the " Agamemnon " of ^schylus, or the 
*' Phoeissse " of Euripides. This had possessed a value almost 
inappreciable in the eyes of accomplished scholars, continually 
growing rare through generations. But four centuries are gone 
by since the destruction of the Western Empire. Christianity, 
with towering grandeurs of another class, has founded a dif- 
ferent empire; and some bigoted, yet perhaps holy monk, has 
washed away (as he persuades himself) the heathen's tragedy, 
replacing it with a monastic legend; which legend is disfigured 
with fables in its incidents, and yet in a higher sense is true, 
because interwoven with Christian morals, and with the sub- 
limest of Christian revelations. Three, four, five centuries 
more, find man still devout as ever; but the language has 
become obsolete, and even for Christian devotion a new era 
has arisen, throwing it into the channel of crusading zeal or 
of chivalrous enthusiasm. The membrana is wanted now for 
a knightly romance — for " my Cid," or Cceur de Lion; for Sir 
Tristrem, or Lybseus Disconus. In this way, by means of 
the imperfect chemistry known to the mediaeval period, the 
same roll has served as a conservatory for three separate gen- 
erations of flowers and fruits, all perfectly different, and yet 
all specially adapted to the wants of the successive possessors. 
The Greek tragedy, the monkish legend, the knightly romance, 
each has ruled its own period. One harvest after another has 
been gathered into the garners of man through ages far apart. 
And the same hydraulic machinery has distributed, through 
the same marble fountains, water, milk, or wine, according to 
the habits and training of the generations that came to quench 
their thirst. 

Such were the achievements of rude monastic chemistry. 
But the more elaborate chemistry of our own days has reversed 
all these motions of our simple ancestors, which results in 
every stage that to them would have realized the most fantastic 
amongst the promises of thaumaturgy. Insolent vaunt of 
Paracelsus, that he would restore the original rose or violet 
out of the ashes settling from its combustion — that is now 
rivalled in this modern achievement. The traces of each suc- 
cessive handwriting, regularly effaced, as had been imagined, 
have, in the inverse order, been regularly called back: the foot- 
steps of the game pursued, wolf or stag, in each several chase, 
have been unlinked, and hunted back through all their doubles ; 
and, as the chorus of the Athenian stage unwove through the 
antistrophe every step that had been mystically woven through 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 1 45 



the strophe, so, by our modern, conjurations of science secrets 
of aees remote from each other have been exorcised from 
the accumulated shadows of centuries. Chemistry, a witch as 
potent as the Erictho of Lucanto ('Tharsaha," lib. vi. or vii.), 
has extorted by her torments, from the dust and ashes of tor- 
gotten centuries, the secrets of a life extinct for the general 
eve but still glowing in the embers. Even the fable of the 
Phc^nix. that secular bird, who propagated his solitary exist- 
ence, and his solitary births, along the line of centuries 
through eternal relays of funeral mists, is but a type of what 
we have done with Palimpsests. We have backed upon each 
phoenix in the long regressus, and forced him to expose his 
ancestral phoenix, sleeping in the ashes below his own ashes. 
Our good old forefathers would have been aghast at our sor- 
ceries; and, if they speculated on the propriety of burning 
Dr Faustus, us they would have burned by acclamation irial 
there would have been none; and they could not otherwise 
have satisfied their horror of the brazen profligacy marking 
our modern magic, than by ploughing up the houses of al 
who had been parties to it, and sowing the ground with salt. 
Fancy not, reader, that this tumult of images, illustrative or 
allusive, moves under any impulse or purpose of mirth, it 
is but the coruscation of a restless understanding often made 
ten times more so by irritation of the nerves such as you will 
first learn to comprehend (its how and its why) some stage or 
two ahead. The image, the memorial, the record which for 
me is derived from a palimpsest, as to one great fact in our 
^uman being, and which immediately I will show you, is but 
tSTrepellent of laughter; or, even if laughter had been pos- 
s^le nrwould have been ;uch laughter as oftentimes is thrown 
off from the fields of oceans,^ laughter that hides, or that 
seems to evade mustering tumult; foam-bells that weave gar- 
land^ of phosphoric radiance for one moment round the eddies 
of gleaming abysses; mimicries of earth-born flowers that fo 
the eye raise phantoms of gayety, as oftentimes for the ear 
they raise the echoes of fugitive laughter, mixing with the 
ravines and choir-voices of an angry sea. ^ v fV,^ 

What else than a natural and mighty pal't^P.^"* . *^ 
human brain? Such a palimpsest is my bram; such a palimp- 
sesToh reader! is yours". Everlasting layers of 'deas images 
fee ings have fallen upon your brain softly as light Each 
ucSn has seemed to bury all that went before. And y 
in reality, not one has been extinguished. And if, in the vel 



10 



146 DE QUINCEY 

lum palimpsest, lying amongst the other diplomata of human 
archives or libraries, there is anything fantastic or which moves 
to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions 
of those successive themes, having no natural connection, 
which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, 
yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial 
palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such 
incoherencies. The fleeting accidents of a man's Hfe, and its 
external shows, may indeed be irrelate and incongruous; but 
the organizing principles which fuse into harmony, and gather 
about fixed predetermined centres, whatever heterogeneous 
elements life may have accumulated from without, will not 
permit the grandeur of human unity greatly to be violated, or 
its ultimate repose to be troubled, in the retrospect from dying 
moments or from other great convulsions. 

Such a convulsion is the struggle of gradual sufifocation, 
as in drowning; and, in the original Opium Confessions, I 
mentioned a case of that nature communicated to me by a 
lady from her own childish experience. The lady is still living, 
though now of unusually great age; and I may mention that 
amongst her faults never was numbered any levity of prin- 
ciple, or carelessness of the most scrupulous veracity; but on 
the contrary, such faults as arise from austerity, too harsh, 
perhaps, and gloomy indulgent neither to others nor herself. 
And, at the time of relating this incident, when already very 
old, she had become religious to asceticism. According to my 
present belief, she had completed her ninth year, when, play- 
ing by the side of a solitary brook, she fell into one of its 
deepest pools. Eventually, but after what lapse of time 
nobody ever knew, she was saved from death by a farmer, who 
riding in some distant lane, had seen her rise to the surface; 
but not until she had descended within the abyss of death, and 
looked into its secrets, as far, perhaps, as ever human eye can 
have looked that had permission to return. At a certain stage 
of this descent, a blow seemed to strike her, phosphoric radi- 
ance sprang forth from her eyeballs; and immediately a 
mighty theatre expanded within her brain. In a moment, in 
the twinkling of an eye, every act, every design of her past 
life, lived again, arraying themselves not as a succession, but 
as parts of a coexistence. Such a light fell upon the whole 
path of her life backwards into the shades of infancy, as the 
light, perhaps, which wrapt the destined Apostle on his road 
to Damascus. Yet that light blinded for a season; but hers 
poured celestial vision upon the brain, so that her conscious- 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 1 47 

ness became omnipresent at one moment to every feature in 
the infinite review. 

This anecdote was treated sceptically at the time by some 
critics. But, besides that it has since been confirmed by other 
experience essentially the same, reported by other parties in 
the same circumstances, who had never heard of each other, the 
true point for astonishment is not the simultaneity of arrange- 
ment under which the past events of life, though in fact suc- 
cessive, had formed their dread line of revelation. This was 
but a secondary phenomenon; the deeper lay in the resur- 
rection itself, and the possibility of resurrection, for what had 
so long slept in the dust A pall, deep as oblivion, had been 
thrown by life over every trace of these experiences; and yet 
suddenly, at a silent command, at the signal of a blazing 
rocket sent up from the brain, the pall draws up, and the 
whole depths of the theatre are exposed. Here was the 
greater mystery: now this mystery is liable to no doubt; for 
it is repeated, and ten thousand times repeated, by opium, for 
those who are its martyrs. 

Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious hand-writings 
of grief or joy which have inscribed themselves successively 
upon the palimpsest of your brain; and, like the annual leaves 
of aboriginal forests, or the undissolving snows on the 
Himalaya, or light falling upon light, the endless strata have 
covered up each other in forgetfulness. But by the hour of 
death, but by fever, but by the searchings of opium, all these 
can revive in strength. They are not dead, but sleeping. In 
the illustration imagined by myself, from the case of some 
individual palimpsest, the Grecian tragedy had seemed to be 
displaced, but was not displaced, by the monkish legend; and 
the monkish legend had seemed to be displaced, but was not 
displaced, by the knightly romance. In some potent convul- 
sion of the system, all wheels back into its earliest elementary 
stage. The bewildering romance, light tarnished with dark- 
ness, the semi-fabulous legend, truth celestial mixed with 
human falsehoods, these fade even of themselves, as life 
advances. The romance has perished that the young man 
adored; the legend has gone that deluded the boy; but the 
deep, deep tragedies of infancy, as when the child's hands 
were unlinked forever from his mother's neck, or his lips 
forever from his sister's kisses, these remain lurking below 
all, and these lurk to the last. Alchemy there is none 
of passion or disease that can scorch away these immortal 
impresses; and the dream which closed the preceding section, 



148 DE QUINCEY 

together with the succeeding dreams of this (which may be 
viewed as in the nature of choruses winding up the overture), 
are but illustrations of this truth, such as every man probably 
will meet experimentally who passes through similar convul- 
sions of dreaming or delirium from any similar or equal dis- 
turbance in his nature.' 

Notes 

^ Some readers may be apt to suppose, from all English experience, 
that the word exorcise means properly banishment to the shades. Not 
so. Citation from the shades, or sometimes the torturing coercion of 
mystic adjurations, is more truly the primary sense. 

^ Many readers will recall, though, at the moment of writing, my 
own thoughts did not recall, the well-known passage in the 
" Prometheus " — 

novrioav rs tcvjuarcov 
AvT^pidjuov yEXa6rja. 

"O multitudinous laughter of the ocean billows!" It is not clear 
whether ^schylus contemplated the laughter as addressing the ear or 
the eye. 

"This, it may be said, requires a corresponding duration of experi- 
ence, but, as an argument for this mysterious power lurking in our 
nature, I may remind the reader of one phenomenon open to the notice 
of everybody, namely, the tendency of very aged persons to throw 
back and concentrate the light of their memory upon scenes of early 
childhood, as to which they recall many traces that had faded even 
to themselves in middle life, whilst they often forget altogether the 
whole intermediate stages of their experience. This shows that nat- 
urally, and without violent agencies, the human brain is by tendency 
a palimpsest. 



lY 

LEV ANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW 

OFTENTIMES at Oxford I saw Levana in my dreams. 
I knew her by her Roman symbols. Who is Levana? 
Readers, that do not pretend to have leisure for very 
much scholarship, you will not be angry with me for 
telling you. Levana was the Roman goddess that performed 
for the new-born infant the earliest office of ennobling kindness, 
— typical, by its mode, of that grandeur which belongs to 
man everywhere, and of that benignity in powers invisible 
which even in Pagan worlds sometimes descends to sustain 
it. At the very moment of birth, just as the infant tasted 
for the first time the atmosphere of our troubled planet, it 
was laid on the ground. That might bear different interpre- 
tations. But immediately, lest so grand a creature should 
grovel there for more than one instant, either the paternal 
hand, as proxy for the goddess Levana, or some near 
kinsman, as proxy for the father, raised it upright, bade 
it look erect as the king of all this world, and presented its 
forehead to the stars, saying, perhaps, in his heart, " Behold 
what is greater than yourselves!" This symbohc act repre- 
sented the function of Levana. And that -mysterious lady, who 
never revealed her face (except to me in dreams), but always 
acted by delegation, had her name from the Latin verb (as 
still it is the Italian verb) levare, to raise aloft. 

This is the explanation of Levana. And hence it has arisen 
that some people have understood by Levana the tutelary 
pov/er that controls the education of the nursery. She, that 
would not suffer at his birth even a prefigurative or mimic 
degradation for her awful ward, far less could be supposed to 
suffer the real degradation attaching to the non-development 
of his powers. She therefore watches over human education 
Now, the word educo, with the penultimate short, was derived 
(by a process often exemplified in the crystallization of lan- 
guages) from the word educo, with the penultimate long. 
Whatsoever educes, or develops, educates. By the education 
of Levana, therefore, is meant,— not the poor machinery that 

149 



150 DE QUINCEY 

moves by spelling-books and grammars, but that mighty 
system of central forces hidden in the deep bosom of human 
life, which by passion, by strife, by temptation, by the energies 
of resistance, works forever upon children, — resting not day 
or night, any more than the mighty wheel of day and night 
themselves, whose moments, like restless spokes, are glim- 
mering^ forever as they revolve. 

If, then, these are the ministries by which Levana works, 
how profoundly must she reverence the agencies of grief! But 
you, reader! think, — that children generally are not liable to 
grief such as mine. There are two senses in the word gener- 
ally, — the sense of Euclid, where it means universally (or in 
the whole extent of the genus), and a foolish sense of this 
world, where it means usually. Now, I am far from saying 
that children universally are capable of grief like mine. But 
there are more than you ever heard of who die of grief in this 
island of ours. I will tell you a common case. The rules of 
Eton require that a boy on the foundation should be there 
twelve years: he is superannuated at eighteen, consequently 
he must come at six. Children torn away from mothers and 
sisters at that age not unfrequently die. I speak of what I 
know. The complaint is not entered by the registrar as grief; 
but that it is. Grief of that sort, and at that age, has killed 
more than ever have been counted amongst its martyrs. 

Therefore it is that Levana often communes with the 
powers that shake man's heart: therefore it is that she dotes 
upon grief. " These ladies," said I softly to myself, on seeing 
the ministers with whom Levana was conversing, " these are 
the Sorrows; and they are three in number, as the Graces are 
three, who dress man's life with beauty; the Parcae are three, 
who weave the dark arras of man's life in their mysterious 
loom always with colours sad in part, sometimes angry with 
tragic crimson and black; the Furies are three, who visit with 
retributions called from the other side of the grave ofifences 
that walk upon this; and once even the Muses were but 
three, who fit the harp, the trumpet, or the lute, to the great 
burdens of man's impassioned creations. These are the Sor- 
rows, all three of whom I know." The last words I say now; 
but in Oxford I said, " one of whom I know, and the others 
too surely I shall know." For already, in my fervent youth, 
I saw (dimly relieved upon the dark back-ground of my 
dreams) the imperfect lineaments of the awful sisters. These 
sisters — by what name shall we call them? 

If I say simply, "The Sorrows," there will be a chance of 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 15I 

mistaking the term; it might be understood of individual sor- 
row—separate cases of sorrow — whereas I want a term 
expressing the mighty abstractions that incarnate themselves 
in all individual sufferings of man's heart; and I wish to have 
these abstractions presented as impersonations, that is,^ as 
clothed with human attributes of life, and with functions point- 
ing to flesh. Let us call them, therefore. Our Ladies of bor- 
row I know them thoroughly, and have walked in all their 
kingdoms. Three sisters they are, of one mysterious house- 
hold; and their paths are wide apart; but of their dominion 
there is no end. Them I saw often conversing with Levana, 
and sometimes about myself. Do they talk, then? 0» no! 
Mio-hty phantoms like these disdain the infirmities of lan- 
eua^e They may utter voices through the organs of man 
when they dwell in human hearts, but amongst themselves is 
no voice nor sound; eternal silence reigns in their kingdoms 
They spoke not, as they talked with Levana; they whispered 
not- they sang not; though oftentimes methought they might 
have sung: for I upon earth had heard their mysteries often- 
times deciphered by harp and timbrel, by dulcimer and organ. 
Like God, whose servants they are, they utter their pleasure 
not by sounds that perish, or by words that go astray, but by 
signs in heaven, by changes on earth, by pulses m secret rivers 
heraldries painted on darkness, and hieroglyphics written on 
the tablets of the brain. They wheeled in mazes; I spelled the 
steps. They telegraphed from afar; I read the signals, ihey 
conspired together; and on the mirrors of darkness my eye 
traced the plots. Theirs were the symbols ; mine are the words 
What is it the sisters are? What is it that they do? Let me 
describe their form, and their presence; if form it were that 
still fluctuated in its outline; or presence it were that forever 
advanced to the front, or forever receded amongst shades. 

The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachrymarum, Uur 
I adv of Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans, 
cdling for vanished faces. She stood, in Rama, where a voice 
was h^eard of lamentation.- Rachel weeping for her children, 
Tnd refused to be comforted. She it was that stood in Bethle- 
hem on the night when Herod's sword swept its n^.^^erf ^°j 
toocents, and the little feet were stiffened forever, which heard 
at times as they tottered along floors overhead woke pulses of 
love in household hearts that were not unmarked m heaven. 

Her eyes are sweet and subtile, wild and sleepy, by turns; 
oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the 
he™ Shewears a diadem round her head. And I knew 



152 DE QUINCEY 

by childish memories that she could go abroad upon the winds, 
when she heard that sobbing of litanies, or the thundering of 
organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer clouds. 
This sister, the elder, it is that carries keys more than papal at 
her girdle, which open every cottage and every palace. She, 
to my knowledge, sat all last summer by the bedside of the 
blind beggar, him that so often and so gladly I talked with, 
whose pious daughter, eight years old, with the sunny counte- 
nance, resisted the temptations of play and village mirth to 
travel all day long on dusty roads with her afflicted father. 
For this did God send her a great reward. In the spring- 
time of the year, and whilst yet her own spring was budding, 
he recalled her to himself. But her blind father mourns forever 
over her; still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding 
hand is locked within his own; and still he wakens to a dark- 
ness that is now within a second and a deeper darkness. This 
Mater Lachrymarum also has been sitting all this winter of 
1844-5 within the bedchamber of the Czar, bringing before his 
eyes a daughter (pot less pious) that vanished to God not less 
suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound. By 
the power of her keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides a 
ghostly intruder into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless 
women, sleepless children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile 
to Mississippi. And her, because she is the first-born of her 
house, and has the widest empire, let us honour with the title of 
" Madonna." 

The second sister is called Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of 
Sighs. She never scales the clouds nor walks abroad upon the 
winds. She wears no diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever 
seen, would be neither sweet nor subtile; no man could read 
their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams, 
and with wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her 
eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops for- 
ever, forever fastens on the dust. She weeps not. She groans 
not. But she sighs inaudibly at intervals. Her sister 
Madonna is oftentimes stormy and frantic, raging in the highest 
against heaven, and demanding back her darlings. But Our 
Lady of Sighs never clamours, never defies, dreams not of rebel- 
lious aspirations. She is humble to abjectness. Hers is the 
meekness that belongs to the hopeless. Murmur she may, but 
it is in her sleep. Whisper she may, but it is to herself in the 
twilight. Mutter she does at times, but it is in solitary places 
that are desolate as she is desolate, in ruined cities, and when 
the sun has gone down to his rest. This sister is the visitor 



^ SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 153 

of the Pariah, of the Jew, of the bondsman to the oar in the 
Mediterranean galleys; of the English criminal in Norfolk 
Island, blotted out from the books of remembrance in sweet 
far-off England; of the baffled penitent reverting his eyes for- 
ever upon a solitary grave, which to him seems the altar over- 
thrown of some past and bloody sacrifice, on which altar no 
oblations can now be availing, whether towards pardon that 
he might implore, or towards reparation that he might attempt. 
Every slave that at noonday looks up to the tropical sun with 
timid reproach, as he points with one hand to the earth, our 
general mother, but for him a step-mother, — as he points with 
the other hand to the Bible, our general teacher, but against 
him sealed and sequestered;^ every woman sitting in darkness, 
without love to shelter her head, or hope to illumine her soli- 
tude, because the heaven-born instincts kindling in her nature 
germs of holy affections, which God implanted in her womanly 
bosom, having been stifled by social necessities, now burn sul- 
lenly to waste, like sepulchral lamps amongst the ancients; 
every nun defrauded of her unreturning May-time by wicked 
kinsman, whom God will judge; every captive in every dun- 
geon; all that are betrayed, and all that are rejected; outcasts 
by traditionary law, and children of hereditary disgrace, — all 
these walk with Our Lady of Sighs. She also carries a key; 
but she needs it little. For her kingdom is chiefly amongst the 
tents of Shem, and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet 
in the very highest ranks of man she finds chapels of her own; 
and even in glorious England there are some that, to the 
world, carry their heads as proudly as the reindeer, who yet 
secretly have received her mark upon their foreheads. 

But the third sister, who is also the youngest ! Hush! 

whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or 
else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power 
is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost 
beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes rising 
so high might be hidden by distance. But, being what they are, 
they cannot be hidden ; through the treble veil of crape which 
she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not 
for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for 
ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground. 
She is the defier of God. She also is the mother of lunacies, 
and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her 
power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can 
approach only those in whom a profound nature has been 
upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles 



L 



154 DE QUINCEY 

and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from with- 
out and tempest from within. Madonna moves with uncertain 
steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of 
Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister 
moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with a tiger's 
leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst 
men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at 
all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum, — Our Lady of 
Darkness. 

These were the Semnai Theai, or Sublime Goddesses,' these 
were the Eumenides, or Gracious Ladies (so called by antiquity 
in shuddering propitiation) of my Oxford dreams. Madonna 
spoke. She spoke by her mysterious hand. Touching my 
head, she beckoned to Our Lady of Sighs ; and what she spoke, 
translated out of the signs which (except in dreams) no man 
reads, was this: 

" Lo! here is he, whom in childhood I dedicated to my altars. 
This is he that once I made my darling. Him I led astray, him 
I beguiled, and from heaven I stole away his young heart to 
mine. Through me did he become idolatrous ; and through me 
it was, by languishing desires, that he worshipped the w^orm, 
and prayed to the wormy grave. Holy was the grave to him; 
lovely was its darkness; saintly its corruption. Him, this 
young idolator, I have seasoned for thee, dear gentle Sister of 
Sighs! Do thou take him now to thy heart, and season him 
for our dreadful sister. And thou," — turning to the Mater 
Tenebrarum, she said, — " wicked sister, that temptest and 
hatest, do thou take him from her. See that thy sceptre lie 
heavy on his head. Suffer not woman and her tenderness to 
sit near him in his darkness. Banish the frailties of hope, 
wither the relenting of love, scorch the fountains of tears, curse 
him as only thou canst curse. So shall he be accomphshed 
in the furnace, so shall he see the things that ought not to be 
seen, sights that are abominable, and secrets that are unutter- 
able. So shall he read elder truths, sad truths, grand truths, 
fearful truths. So shall he rise again before he dies. And so 
shall our commission be accomplished which from God we 
had, — to plague his heart until we had unfolded the capacities 
of his spirit."* 

( Notes 

* As I have never allowed myself to covet any man's ox, nor his ass, 
nor anything that is his, still less would it become a philosopher to 
covet other people's images, or metaphors. Here, therefore, I restore 
to Mr. Wordsworth this fine image of the revolving wheel, and the 
glimmering spokes, as applied by him to the flying successions of day 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 155 

and night. I borrowed it for one moment in order to point my own 
sentence; which being done, the reader is witness that I now pay it 
back instantly by a note made for that sole purpose,. On the same 
principle I often borrow their seals from young ladies, when closing 
my letters. Because there is sure to be some tender sentiment upon 
them about " memory," or "hope," or " roses," or " reunion; " and my 
correspondent must be a sad brute who is not touched by the eloquence 
of the seal, even if his taste is so bad that he remains deaf to mine. 

^This, the reader will be aware, applies chiefly to the cotton and 
tobacco States of North America; but not to them only: on which 
account I have not scrupled to figure the sun, which looks down 
upon slavery as tropical; no matter if strictly within the tropics, or 
simply so near to them as to produce a similar climate. 

^ The word dejjvoi; is usually rendered "venerable" in dictionaries; 
not a very flattering epithet for women. But by weighing a number of 
passages in which the word is used pointedly, I am disposed to think 
that it comes nearest to our idea of the sublime, as near as a Greek 
word could come. 

*The reader, who wishes at all to understand the course of these 
confessions, ought not to pass over this dream-legend. There is no 
great wonder that a vision, which occupied my waking thoughts in 
those years, should reappear in my dreams. It was, in fact, a legend 
recurring in sleep, most of which I had myself silently -written or 
sculptured in my daylight reveries. But its importance to the present 
confessions is this, that it rehearses or prefigures their course. 



THE APPARITION OF THE BROCKEN 

ASCEND with me on this dazzHng Whitsunday the 
Brocken of North Germany. The dawn opened in 
cloudless beauty; it is a dawn of bridal June; but, as 
the hours advanced, her youngest sister April, that 
sometimes cares little for racing across both frontiers of May, 
frets the bridal lady's sunny temper with sallies of wheeling 
and careering showers, flying and pursuing, opening and clos- 
ing, hiding and restoring. On such a morning, and reaching 
the summits of the forest mountain about sunrise, we shall 
have one chance the more for seeing the famous Spectre of 
the Brocken.^ Who and what is he? He is a solitary appari- 
tion, in the sense of loving solitude; else he is not always soli- 
tary in his personal manifestations, but on proper occasions, 
has been known to unmask a strength quite sufficient to alarm 
those who had been insulting him. 

Now, in order to test the nature of this mysterious apparition, 
we will try two or three experiments upon him. What we fear, 
and with some reason, is, that as he lived so many ages with 
foul Pagan sorcerers, and witnessed so many centuries of dark 
idolatries, his heart may have been corrupted; and that even 
now his faith may be wavering or impure. We will try. 

Make the sign of the cross, and observe whether he repeats 
it (as on Whitsunday"* he surely ought to do). Look ! he does 
repeat it; but the driving showers perplex the images, and 
that, perhaps, it is which gives him the air of one who acts 
reluctantly or evasively. Now, again, the sun shines more 
brightly, and the showers have swept off like squadrons of 
cavalry to the rear. We will try him again. 

Pluck an anemone, one of these many anemones which once 
was called the sorcerer's flower,' and bore a part, perhaps, in 
this horrid ritual of fear; carry it to that stone which mimics 
the outline of a heathen altar, and once was called the sorcerer's 
altar;' then bending your knee, and raising your right hand to 
God, say, — " Father, which art in heaven, this lovely anemone, 
that once glorified the worship of fear, has travelled back into 

156 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 157 

thy fold; this altar, which once reeked with bloody rites to 
Cortho, has long been rebaptized into thy holy service. The 
darkness is gone; the cruelty is gone which the darkness bred; 
the moans have passed away which the victims uttered ; the 
cloud has vanished which once sat continually upon their 
graves, cloud of protestation that ascended forever to thy throne 
from the tears of the defenceless, and the anger of the just. 
And lo! I thy servant, with this dark phantom, whom for one 
hour on this thy festival of Pentecost I make my servant, ren- 
der thee united worship in this thy recovered temple." 

Look now! the apparition plucks an anemone, and places it 
on an altar ; he also bends his knee, he also raises his right hand 
to God. Dumb he is; but sometimes the dumb serve God 
acceptably. Yet still it occurs to you, that perhaps on this 
high festival of the Christian church he may be overruled by 
supernatural influence into confession of his homage, having 
so often been made to bow and bend his knee at murderous 
rites. In a service of religion he may be timid. Let us try 
him, therefore, with an earthly passion, where he will have no 
bias either from favour or from fear. 

If, then, once in childhood you suffered an affliction that was 
ineffable, — if once, when powerless to face such an enemy, you 
were summoned to fight With the tiger that couches within the 
separations of the grave, — in that case, after the example of 
Judaea (on the Roman coins), — sitting under her palm-tree to 
weep, but sitting with her head veiled, — do you also veil your 
head. Many years are passed away since then; and you were 
a little ignorant thing at that time, hardly above six years old ; 
or perhaps (if you durst tell all the truth), not quite so much. 
But your heart was deeper than the Danube; and, as was your 
love, so was your grief. Many years are gone since that dark- 
ness settled on your head; many summers, many winters; yet 
still its shadows wheel round upon you at intervals, like these 
April showers upon this glory of bridal June. Therefore now, 
on this dovelike morning of Pentecost do you veil your head 
like Judaea in memory of that transcendent woe, and in testi- 
mony that, indeed, it surpassed all utterance of words. Imme- 
diately you see that the apparition of the Brocken veils his 
head, after the model of Judaea weeping under her palm-tree, as 
if he also had a human heart, and that he also, in childhood, 
having suffered an affliction which was ineffable, wished by 
these mute symbols to breathe a sigh towards heaven in 
memory of that affliction, and by way of record, though many 
a year after, that it was indeed unutterable by words. 



158 DE QUINCEY 

This trial is decisive. You are now satisfied that the appari- 
tion is but a reflex of yourself; and, in uttering your secret feel- 
ings to him, you make this phantom the dark symbolic mirror 
for reflection to the daylight what else must be hidden forever. 

Such a relation does the Dark Interpreter, whom immedi- 
ately the reader will learn to know as an intruder into my 
dreams, bear to my own mind. He is originally a mere reflex 
of my inner nature. But as the apparition of the Brocken 
sometimes is disturbed by storms or by driving showers, so as 
to dissemible his real origin, in like manner the Interpreter 
sometimes swerves out of my orbit, and mixes a little with alien 
natures. I do not always know him in these cases as my own 
parhelion. What he says, generally, is but that which I have 
said in daylight, and in meditation deep enough to sculpture 
itself on my heart. But sometimes, as his face alters, his 
words alter; and they do not always seem such as I have used, 
or could use. No man can account for all things that occur 
in dreams. Generally I believe this, — that he is a faithful rep- 
resentative of myself; but he also is at times subject to the 
action of the good Phantasus, who rules in dreams. 

Hailstone choruses* besides, and storms, enter my dreams. 
Hailstones and fire that run along the ground, sleet and blind- 
ing hurricanes, revelations of glory insufferable pursued by vol- 
leying darkness, — these are powers able to disturb any features 
that originally were but shadow, and so send drifting the 
anchors of any vessel that rides upon deeps so treacherous as 
those of dreams. Understand, however, the Interpreter to 
bear generally the office of a tragic chorus at Athens. The 
Greek chorus is perhaps not quite understood by critics, any 
more than the Dark Interpreter by myself. But the leading 
function of both must be supposed this — not to tell you any- 
thing absolutely new, — that was done by the actors in the 
drama; but to recall you to your own lurking thoughts, — hid- 
den for the moment or imperfectly developed, — and to place 
before you, in immediate connection with groups vanishing 
too quickly for any efifort of meditation on your own part, such 
commentaries, prophetic or looking back, pointing the moral 
or deciphering the mystery, justifying Providence, or miti- 
gating the fierceness of anguish, as would or might have 
occurred to your own meditative heart, had only time been 
allowed for its motions. 

The Interpreter is anchored and stationary in my dreams; but 
great storms and driving mists cause him to fluctuate uncer- 
tainly, or even to retire altogether, like his gloomy counter- 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 159 

part, the shy phantom of the Brocken, — and to assume new 
features or strange features, as in dreams always there is a 
power not contented with reproduction, but which absolutely 
creates or ■ transforms. This dark being the reader will see 
again in a further stage of my opium experience; and I warn 
him that he will not always be found sitting inside my dreams, 
but at times outside, and in open daylight. 

Notes 

* This very striking phenomenon has been continually described by 
writers, both German and EngHsh, for the last fifty years. Many 
readers, however, will not have met with these descriptions; and on 
their account I add a few words in explanation, referring them for the 
best scientific comment on the case to Sir David Brewster's " Natural 
Magic." The spectre takes the shape of a human figure, or, if the 
visiters are more than one, then the spectres multiply; they arrange 
themselves on the blue ground of the sky, or the dark ground of any 
clouds that may be in the right quarter, or perhaps they are strongly 
relieved against a curtain of rock, at a distance of some miles, and 
always exhibiting gigantic proportions. At first, from the distance 
and the colossal size, every spectator supposes the appearance to be 
quite independent of himself. But very soon he is surprised to observe 
his own motions and gestures mimicked; and wakens to the convic- 
tion that the phantom is but a dilated reflection of himself. This 
Titan among the apparitions of earth is exceedingly capricious, van- 
ishing abruptly for reasons, best known to himself, and more coy in 
coming forward than the Lady Echo of Ovid. One reason why he 
is seen so seldom must be ascribed to the concurrence of conditions 
under which only the phenomenon can be manifested; the sun must 
be near to the horizon (which of itself implies a time of day incon- 
venient to a person starting from a station as distant as Elbingerode) ; 
the spectator must have his back to the sun; and the air must contain 
some vapour, but partially distributed. Coleridge ascended the Brocken 
on the Whitsunday of 1799, with a party of English students from 
Gottingen, but failed to see the phantom; afterwards in England (and 
under the three same conditions) he saw a much rarer phenomenon, 
which he described in the following eight lines. I give them from a 
correct copy (the apostrophe in the beginning must be understood as 
addressed to an ideal conception) : 

" And art thou nothing? Such thou art as when 
The woodman winding westward up the glen 
At wintry dawn, when o'er the sheep-track's maze 
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glistening haze. 
Sees full before him, gliding without tread, 
An image with a glory round its head; 
This shade he worships for its golden hues. 
And makes (not knowing) that which he pursues." 

' It is singular, and perhaps owing to the temperature and weather 
likely to prevail in that early part of summer, that more appearances 
of the spectre have been witnessed on Whitsunday than on any other 
day. 



l6o DE QUINCEY 

' These are names still clinging to the anemone of the Brocken, and 
to an altar-shaped fragment of granite near one of the summits; and 
it is not doubted that they both connect themselves, through links of 
ancient tradition, with the gloomy realities of Paganism, when the 
whole Hartz and the Brocken formed for a very long time the last 
asylum to a ferocious but perishing idolatry. 

* I need not tell any lover of Handel that his oratorio of " Israel in 
Egypt " contains ^ chorus familiarly known by this name. The words 
are: "And he gave them hailstones for rain; fire, mingled with hail, 
ran along upon the ground." 



YI 



SAVANNAH -LA -MAR 



G 



OD smote Savannah-la-mar, and in one night, by earth- 
quake, removed her, with all her towers standmg and 
population sleeping, from the steadfast foundations of 
the shore to the coral floors of ocean. And God said,— 
"Pompeii did I bury and conceal from men through seven- 
teen centuries: this city I will bury, but not conceal. She 
shall be a monument to men of my mysterious anger, set 
L azure light through generations t° /°«^: j^f,, ^^ 
enshrine he? in a crystal dome of my tropic seas. Th. 
city, therefore, like a mighty galleon with all her apparel 
mounted, streamers flying, and tackhng perfect, s«ms floating 
along -the noiseless depths of ocean; and of fntimes m 
glassy calms, through the translucid atmosphere of water that 
now stretches like an 'air-woven awning f°7^^^^ *f ,^^'^^"* 
encampment, mariners from every clime look down into her 
courSand terraces, count her gates, and number the spires of 
her churches. She is one ample cemetery, and has been for 
minv a year; but in the mighty calms that brood for weeks 
"ver^tropk latitudes she fascinates the eye with a Fata-Morgana 
revelation as of human life still subsisting in submarine asylums 
sacred from the storms that torment our upper air 

Thither lured by the loveliness of cerulean depths, by the 
peace of human dwellings privileged from molestation, by the 
K of marble altars sleeping in everlasting sancti y, often- 

UmeTin dreams did I and the Dark Interpret^--, -^^ttTf into 
wTtery veil that divided us from her streets. We looked into 
he belfries where the pendulous bells were waiting m vain 
or the summons which should awaken their marriage peals; 
together wTtouched the mighty organ-keys, that sang no jubi- 
lates for the ear of Heaven, that sang no requiems for the ear 
of human sorrow; together we searched the silent nurseries 
where"he Chi dren were all asleep, and had been asleep through 
five «nerations. " They are waiting for the heavenly dawn, 
whislered the Interpreter to himself: " and, when tha comes, 
The bells and the origans will utter a jubilate repeatea by the 
II '61 



1 62 DE QUINCEY 

echoes of Paradise.'' Then, turning to me, he said, — " This 
is sad, this is piteous; but less would not have sufficed for the 
purpose of God. Look here. Put into a Roman clepsydra 
one hundred drops of water; let these run out as the sands in an 
hour-glass; every drop measuring the hundredth part of a 
second, so that each shall represent but the three-hundred-and- 
sixty-thousandth part of an hour. Now, count the drops as 
they race along; and, when the fiftieth of the hundred is passing, 
behold! forty-nine are not, because already they have perished; 
and fifty are not, because they are yet to come. You see, there- 
fore, how narrow, how incalculably narrow, is the true and 
actual present. Of that time which we call the present, hardly 
a hundredth part but belongs either to a past which has fled, 
or to a future which is still on the wing. It has perished, or it 
is not born. It was, or it is not. Yet even this approxima- 
tion to the truth is infinitely false. For again subdivide that 
solitary drop, which only was found to represent the present 
into a lower series of similar fractions, and the actual present 
which you arrest measures now but the thirty-sixth-millionth 
of an hour; and so by infinite declensions the true and very 
present, in which only we live and enjoy, will vanish into a 
mote of a mote, distinguishable only by a heavenly vision. 
Therefore the present, which only man possesses, offers less 
capacity for his footing than the slenderest film that ever 
spider twisted from her womb. Therefore, also, even this 
incalculable shadow from the narrowest pencil of moonlight 
is more transitory than geometry can measure, or thought of 
angel can overtake. The time which is contracts into a mathe- 
matic point; and even that point perishes a thousand times 
before we can utter its birth. All is finite in the present; and 
even that finite is infinite in its velocity of flight towards death. 
But in God there is nothing finite; but in God there is nothing 
transitory; but in God there can be nothing that tends to death. 
Therefore, it follows, that for God there can be no present. 
The future is the present of God, and to the future it is that 
he sacrifices the human present. Therefore it is that he works 
by earthquake. Therefore it is that he works by grief. O, 
deep is the ploughing of earthquake! O, deep" — [and his 
voice swelled like a sanctus rising from the choir of a cathed- 
ral] — " O, deep is the ploughing of grief! But oftentimes less 
would not suffice for the agriculture of God. Upon a night of 
earthquake he builds a thousand years of pleasant habitations 
for man. Upon the sorrow of an infant he raises oftentimes 
from human intellects glorious vintages that could not else 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 163 

have been. Less than these fierce ploughshares would not 
have stirred the stubborn soil. The one is needed for earth, 
our planet,— for earth itself as the dwelling-place of man; but 
the other is needed yet oftener for God's mightiest instrument, 
— yes" [and he looked solemnly at myself], "is needed for 
the mysterious children of the earth ! " 



VII 



VISION OF LIFE 



THE Oxford visions, of which some have been given, were 
but anticipations necessary to illustrate the glimpse 
opened of childhood (as being its reaction). In this 
further part, returning from that anticipation, I retrace 
an abstract of my boyish and youthful days, so far as they 
furnished or exposed the germs of later experiences in worlds 
more shadowy. 

Upon me, as upon others scattered thinly by tens and 
twenties over every thousand years, fell too powerfully and too 
early the vision of life. The horror of life mixed itself already 
in earliest youth with the heavenly sweetness of life; that grief, 
which one in a hundred has sensibility enough to gather from 
the sad retrospect of life in its closing stage, for me shed its 
dews as a prelibation upon the fountains of life whilst yet spark- 
ling to the morning sun. I saw from afar and from before what 
I was to see from behind. Is this the description of an early 
youth passed in the shades of gloom? No; but of a youth 
passed in the divinest happiness. And if the reader has (which 
so few have) the passion, without which there is no reading of 
the legend and superscription upon man's brow, if he is not 
(as most are) deafer than the grave to every deep note that sighs 
upwards from the Delphic caves of human life, he will know 
that the rapture of life, or anything which by approach can 
merit that name, does not arise, unless as perfect music arises, 
music of Mozart or Beethoven, by the confluence of the 
mighty and terrific discords with the subtile concords. Not 
by contrast, or as reciprocal foils, do these elements act, which 
is the feeble conception of many, but by union. They are the 
sexual forces in music: "male and female created he them;" 
and these mighty antagonists do not put forth their hostilities 
by repulsion, but by deepest attraction. 

As " in to-day already walks to-morrow," so in the past 
experience of a youthful life may be seen dimly the future. 
The collisions with alien interests or hostile views, of a child, 
boy, or very young man, so insulated as each of these is sure 

164 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 165 

to be, — those aspects of opposition which such a person can 
occupy, — are Hmited by the exceedingly few and trivial lines 
of connection along which he is able to radiate any essential 
influence whatever upon the fortunes or happiness of Others. 
Circumstances may magnify his importance for the moment; 
but, after all, any cable which he carries out upon other vessels 
is easily slipped upon a feud arising. Far otherwise is the state 
of relations connecting an adult or responsible man with the 
circles around him, as life advances. The network of these 
relations is a thousand times more intricate, the jarring of these 
intricate relations a thousand times more frequent, and the 
vibrations a thousand times harsher which these jarrings dif- 
fuse. This truth is felt beforehand misgivingly and in troubled 
vision, by a young man who stands upon the threshold of 
manhood. One earliest instinct of fear and horror would 
darken his spirit, if it could be revealed to itself and self- 
questioned at the moment of birth : a second instinct of the same 
nature would again pollute that tremulous mirror, if the moment 
were as punctually marked as physical birth is marked, which 
dismisses him finally upon the tides of absolute self-control. A 
dark ocean would seem the total expanse of life from the first; 
but far darker and more appalling vv^ould seem that interior and 
second chamber of the ocean which called him away forever 
from the direct accountability of others. Dreadful would be 
the morning which should say, " Be thou a human child incar- 
nate ;" but more dreadful the morning which should say, " Bear 
thou henceforth the sceptre of thy self-dominion through life, 
and the passions of life!" Yes, dreadful would be both; but 
without a basis of the dreadful there is no perfect rapture. It 
is a part through the sorrow of life, growing out of dark events, 
that this basis of awe and solemn darkness slowly accumulates. 
That I have illustrated. But, as life expands, it is more 
through the strife which besets us, strife from conflicting 
opinions, positions, passions, interests, that the funereal ground 
settles and deposits itself, which sends upward the dark lus- 
trous brilliancy through the jewel of life, else revealing a pale 
and superficial glitter. Either the human being must suffer 
and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his 
gaze must be shallow, and without intellectual revelation. 

Through accident it was in part, and, where through no 
accident but my own nature, not through features of it at all 
painful to recollect, that constantly in early life (that is, from 
boyish days until eighteen, when, by going to Oxford, prac- 
tically I became my own master) I was engaged in duels of 



1 66 DE QUINCE Y 

fierce, continual struggle, with some person or body of persons, 
that sought, like the Roman retiarius, to throw a net of deadly 
coercion or constraint over the undoubted rights of my natural 
freedom. The steady rebellion upon my part in one half was 
a mere human reaction of justifiable indignation; but in the 
other half it was the struggle of a conscientious nature, — dis- 
daining to feel it as any mere right or discretional privilege, — 
no, feeling it as the noblest of duties to resist, though it should 
be mortally, those that would have enslaved me, and to retort 
scorn upon those that would have put my head below their 
feet. Too much, even in later life, I have perceived, in men 
that pass for good men, a disposition to degrade (and if pos- 
sible to degrade through self-degradation) those in whom 
unwillingly they feel any weight of oppression to themselves, 
by commanding qualities of intellect or character. They 
respect you: they are compelled to do so, and they hate to do 
so. Next, therefore, they seek to throw ofif the sense of this 
oppression, and to take vengeance for it, by cooperating with 
any unhappy accidents in your life, to inflict a sense of humilia- 
tion upon you, and (if possible) to force you into becoming a 
consenting party to that humiliation. O, wherefore is it that 
those who presume to call themselves the " friends " of this man 
or that woman are so often those, above all others, whom in the 
hour of death that man or woman is most likely to salute with 
the valediction — Would God I had never seen your face ! 

In citing one or two cases of these early struggles, I have 
chiefly in view the effect of these upon my subsequent visions 
under the reign of opium. And this indulgent reflection 
should accompany the mature reader through all such records 
of boyish inexperience. A good-tempered man, who is also 
acquainted with the world, will easily evade, without needing 
any artifice of servile obsequiousness, those quarrels which an 
upright simplicity, jealous of its own rights, and unpractised in 
the science of world address, cannot always evade without 
some loss of self-respect. Suavity in this manner may, it is 
true, be reconciled with firmness in the matter; but not easily 
by a young person who wants all the appropriate resources of 
knowledge, of adroit and guarded language, for making his 
good temper available. Men are protected from insult and 
wrong, not merely by their own skill, but also, in the absence 
of any skill at all, by the general spirit of forbearance to which 
society has trained all those whom they are likely to meet. 
But boys meeting with no such forbearance or training in other 
boys, must sometimes be thrown upon feuds in the ratio of 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 167 

their own firmness much more than in the ratio of any natural 
proneness to quarrel. Such a subject, however, will be best 
illustrated by a sketch or two of my own principal feuds. 

The first, but merely transient and playful, nor worth noticing 
at all, but for its subsequent resurrection under other and awful 
colouring in my dreams, grew out of an imaginary slight, as I 
viewed it, put upon me by one of my guardians. I had four 
guardians ; and the one of these who had the most knowledge 
and talent of the whole- — a banker, living about a hundred miles 
from my home — had invited me, when eleven years old, to his 
house. His eldest daughter, perhaps a year younger than 
myself, wore at that time upon her very lovely face the most 
angelic expression of character and temper that I have almost 
ever seen. Naturally, I fell in love with her. It seems absurd 
to say so; and the more so, because two children more abso- 
lutely innocent than we were cannot be imagined, neither of 
us having ever been at any school, but the simple truth is, that 
in the most chivalrous sense I was in love with her. And the 
proof that I was so showed itself in three separate modes: I 
kissed her glove on any rare occasion when I found it lying 
on a table; secondly, I looked out for some excuse to be jealous 
of her; and, thirdly, I did my very best to get up a quarrel. 
What I wanted the quarrel for was the luxury of a reconcilia- 
tion; a hill cannot be had, you know, without going to the 
expense of a valley. And though I hated the very thought of 
a moment's difference with so truly gentle a girl, yet how, but 
through such a purgatory, could one win the paradise of her 
returning smiles? All this, however, came to nothing; and 
simply because she positively would not quarrel. And the 
jealousy fell through, because there was no decent subject for 
such a passion, unless it had settled upon an old music-master, 
whom lunacy itself could not adopt as a rival. The quarrel, 
meantime, which never prospered with the daughter, silently 
kindled on my part towards the father. His offence was this. 
At dinner, I naturally placed myself by the side of M., and it 
gave me great pleasure to touch her hand at intervals. As M. 
was my cousin, though twice or even three times removed, I 
did not feel it taking too great a liberty in this Httle act of 
tenderness. No matter if three thousand times removed, I said 
my cousin is my cousin; nor had I very much designed to 
conceal the act; or if so, rather on her account than my own. 
One evening, however, papa observed my manoeuvre. Did he 
seem displeased? Not at all; he even condescended to smile. 
But the next day he placed M. on the side opposite to myself. 



1 68 DE QUINCEY 

In one respect this was really an improvement, because it gave 
me a better view of my cousin's sweet countenance. But then 
there was the loss of the hand to be considered, and secondly 
there was the affront. It was clear that vengeance must be 
had. Now, there was but one thing in this world that I could 
do even decently; but that I could do admirably. This was 
writing Latin hexameters. Juvenal — though it was not very 
much of him that I had then read — seemed to me a divine 
model. The inspiration of wrath spoke through him as through 
a Hebrew prophet. The same inspiration spoke now in me. 
"Facit indignatio versum," said Juvenal. And it must be owned 
that indignation has never made such good verses since as she 
did in that day. But still, even to me, this agile passion proved 
a Muse of genial inspiration for a couple of paragraphs; and 
one line I will mention as worthy to have taken its place in 
Juvenal himself. I say this without scruple, having not a 
shadow of vanity, nor, on the other hand, a shadow of false 
modesty connected with such boyish accomplishments. The 
poem opened thus: 

" Te nemis austerum sacrse qui foedera mensse 
Diruis, insector Satyrae reboante flagello." 

But the line which I insist upon as of Roman strength was the 
closing one of the next sentence. The general eft"ect of the 
sentiment was, that my clamorous wrath should make its way 
even into ears that were past hearing : 

" mea saeva quere a 
Auribus insidet ceratis, auribus etsi 
Non audituris hyberna nocte procellam." 

The power, however, which inflated my verse, soon collapsed; 
having been soothed, from the very first, by finding, that 
except in this one instance at the dinner-table, which probably 
had been viewed as an indecorum, no further restraint, of any 
kind whatever, was meditated upon my intercourse with M. 
Besides, it was too painful to lock up good verses in one^s 
own solitary breast. Yet how could I shock the sweet filial 
heart of my cousin by a fierce lampoon or stylites against her 
father, had Latin even figured amongst her accomplishments? 
Then it occurred to me that the verses might be shown to the 
father. But was there not something treacherous in gaining 
a man's approbation under a mask to a satire upon himself? 
Or would he have always understood me? For one person, 
a year after, took the sacrse mens« (by which I had meant the 
sanctities of hospitality) to mean the sacramental table. And 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 1 69 

on consideration I began to suspect that many people would 
pronounce myself the party who had violated the holy ties of 
hospitality, which are equally binding on guest as on host. 
Indolence, which sometimes comes in aid of good impulses as 
well as bad, favoured these relenting thoughts. The society 
of M. did still more to wean me from further efforts of satire; 
and, finally, my Latin poem remained in torso. But, upon 
the whole, my guardian had a narrow escape of descending to 
posterity in a disadvantageous light, had he rolled down to it 
through my hexameters. 

Here was a case of merely playful feud. But the same talent 
of Latin verses soon after connected me with a real feud, that 
harassed my mind more than would be supposed, and precisely 
by this agency, namely, that it arrayed one set of feelings 
against another. It divided my mind, as by domestic feud, 
against itself. About a year after returning from the visit to 
my guardian's, and when I must have been nearly completing 
my twelfth year, I was sent to a great public school. Every 
man has reason to rejoice who enjoys so great an advantage. 
I condemned, and do condemn, the practice of sometimes send- 
ing out into such stormy exposures those who are as yet too 
young, too dependent on female gentleness, and endowed with 
sensibilities too exquisite. But at nine or ten the masculine 
energies of the character are beginning to be developed; or if 
not, no discipline will better aid in their devolpment than the 
bracing intercourse of a great English classical school. Even 
the selfish are forced into accommodating themselves to a pub- 
lic standard of generosity, and the effeminate into conforming 
to a rule of manliness. I was myself at two public schools; 
and I think with gratitude of the benefit which I reaped from 
both; as also I think with gratitude of the upright guardian 
in whose quiet household I learned Latin so efifectually. But the 
small private schools which I witnessed for brief periods, con- 
taining thirty or forty boys, were models of ignoble manners as 
respected some part of the juniors, and of favouritism amongst 
the masters. Nowhere is the sublimity of public justice so 
broadly exemplified as in an English school. There is not in 
the universe such an areopagus for fair play, and abhorrence 
of all crooked ways, as an English mob, or one of the English 
time-honoured public schools. But my own first introduction 
to such an establishment was under peculiar and contradictory 
circumstances. When my *' rating," or graduation in the 
school, was to be settled, naturally my altitude (to speak astro- 
nomically) was taken by the proficiency in Greek. But I could 



I/O DE QUINCEY 

then barely construe books so easy as the Greek Testament and 
the ''IHad." This was considered quite well enough for my age ; 
but still it caused me to be placed three steps below the highest 
rank in the school. Within one week, however, my talent for 
Latin verses, which had by this time gathered strength and 
expansion, became known. I was honoured as never was man 
or boy since Mordecai the Jew. Not properly belonging to the 
flock of the head master, but to the leading section of the sec- 
ond, I was now weekly paraded for distinction at the supreme 
tribunal of the school; out of which at first grew nothing but 
a sunshine of approbation delightful to my heart, still brooding 
upon solitude. Within six weeks this had changed. The 
approbation, indeed, continued, and the public testimony of it. 
Neither would there, in the ordinary course, have been any 
painful reaction from jealousy, or fretful resistance to the 
soundness of my pretensions; since it was sufficiently known 
to some of my school-fellows, that I, who had no male rela- 
tives but military men, and those in India, could not have 
benefitted by any clandestine aid. But, unhappily the head 
master was at that time dissatisfied with some points in the 
progress of his head form ; and, as it soon appeared, was con- 
tinually throwing in their teeth the brilliancy of my verses at 
twelve, by comparison with theirs at seventeen, eighteen, and 
nineteen. I had observed him sometimes pointing to myself; 
and was perplexed at seeing this gesture followed by gloomy 
looks, and what French reporters call " sensation," in these 
young men, whom naturally I viewed with awe as my leaders, 
boys that were called young men, men that were reading 
Sophocles — (a name that carried with it the sound of some- 
thing seraphic to my ears), — and who never had vouchsafed 
to waste a word on such a child as myself. The day was come, 
however, when all that would be changed. One of these lead- 
ers strode up to me in the public play-grounds, and delivering 
a blow on my shoulder, which was not intended to hurt me, 
but as a mere formula of introduction, asked me " What the 
d — 1 I meant by bolting out of the course, and annoying other 
people in that manner? Were other people to have no rest for 
me and my verses, which, after all, were horribly bad? " There 
might have been some difficulty in returning an answer to this 
address, but none was required. I was briefly admonished to 

see that I wrote worse for the future, or else . At 

this aposiopesis, I looked inquiringly at the speaker, and he 
filled up the chasm by saying that he would " annihilate " me. 
Could any person fail to be aghast at such a demand? I was 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 171 

to write worse than my own standard, which, by his account 
of my verses, must be difficult; and I was to write worse than 
himself, which might be impossible. My feehngs revolted it 
may be supposed, against so arrogant a demand, unless it had 
been far otherwise expressed; and on the next occasion for 
sending up verses, so far from attending to the orders issued, 
I double-shotted my guns; double applause descended on 
myself- but I remarked, with some awe though not repenting 
of what I had done, that double confusion seemed to agitate 
the ranks of my enemies. Amongst them loomed out in the 
distance my " annihilating " friend, who shook his huge fist 
at me, but with something like a grim smile about his eyes. 
He took an early opportunity of paying his respects to me, 
saying, '' You little devil, do you call this writing your worst? 
" No," I replied; " I call it writing my best." The anmhilator, 
as it turned out, was really a good-natured young man ; but he 
soon went off to Cambridge; and with the rest, or some of 
them, I continued to wage war for nearly a year. And yet, 
for a word spoken with kindness, I would have resigned the 
peacock's feather in my cap as the merest of baubles. Undoubt- 
edly praise sounded sweet in my ears also. But that was 
nothing by comparison with what stood on the other side. 1 
detested distinctions that -were connected with mortification 
to others. And, even if I could have got over that, the eternal 
feud fretted and tormented my nature. Love, that once m 
childhood had been so mere a necessity to me, that had long 
been a mere reflected ray from a departed sunset. But peace, 
and freedom from strife, if love were no longer possible (as so 
rarely it is in this world), was the absolute necessity of my 
heart. To contend with somebody was still my fate; how 
to escape the contention I could not see; and yet for itself, 
and the deadly passions into which it forced me, I hated 
and loathed it more than death. It added to the distrac- 
tion and internal feud of my own mind, that I could not alto- 
gether condemn the upper boys. I was made a handle ot 
humiliation to them. And, in the mean time, if I had an advan- 
tao-e in one accomplishment, which is all a matter of accident, 
or peculiar taste and feeling, they, on the other hand, had a 
^reat advantage over me in the more elaborate difficulties ot 
Greek and of choral Greek poetry. I could not altogether 
wonder at their hatred of myself. Yet still, as they had chosen 
to adopt this mode of conflict with me, I did not feel that i had 
any choice but to resist. The contest was terminated for me 
by my removal from the school, in consequence of a very 



172 DE QUINCEY 

threatening illness affecting my head; but it lasted nearly a 
year, and it did not close before several amongst my public 
enemies had become my private friends. They were much 
older, but they invited me to the houses of their friends, and 
showed me a respect which deeply affected me, — this respect 
having more reference, apparently, to the firmness I had exhib- 
ited, than to the splendour of my verses. And, indeed, these had 
rather drooped, from a natural accident; several persons of my 
own class had formed the practice of asking me to write verses 
for them. I could not refuse. But, as the subjects given out 
were the same for all of us, it was not possible to take so many 
crops off the ground without starving the quality of all. 

Two years and a half from this time, I was again at a public 
school of ancient foundation. Now I was myself one of the 
three who formed the highest class. Now I myself was familiar 
with Sophocles, who once had been so shadowy a name in my 
ear. But, strange to say, now, in my sixteenth year, I cared 
nothing at all for the glory of Latin verse. All the business of 
school was light and trivial in my eyes. Costing me not an 
effort, it could not engage any part of my attention; that was 
now swallowed up altogether by the literature of my native 
land. I still reverenced the Grecian drama, as always I must. 
But else I cared little then for classical pursuits. A deeper 
spell had mastered me; and I lived only in those bowers where 
deeper passions spoke. 

Here, however, it was that began another and more impor- 
tant struggle. I was drawing near to seventeen, and, in a year 
after that, would arrive the usual time for going to Oxford. To 
Oxford my guardians made no objection; and they readily 
agreed to make the allowance then universally regarded as the 
minimum for an Oxford student, namely £200 per annum. But 
they insisted, as a previous condition, that I should make a 
positive and definite choice of a profession. Now, I was well 
aware, that, if I did make such a choice, no law existed, nor 
could any obligation be created through deeds or signature, 
by which I could finally be compelled into keeping my engage- 
ment. But this evasion did not suit me. Here, again, I felt 
indignantly that the principle of the attempt was unjust. The 
object was certainly to do me service by saving money, since, 
if I selected the bar as my profession, it was contended by 
some persons (misinformed however), that not Oxford, but a 
special pleader's office, would be my proper destination; but I 
cared not for arguments of that sort. Oxford I was deter- 
mined to make my home; and also to bear my future course 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS I 73 

Utterly untrammelled by promises that I might repent. Soon 
came the catastrophe of this struggle. A little before my seven- 
teenth birthday, I walked off, one lovely summer morning, 
to North Wales, rambled there for months, and, finally, under 
some obscure hopes of raising money on my personal security, 
I went up to London. Now I was in my eighteenth year, and 
during this period it was that I passed through that trial of 
severe distress, of which I gave some account in my former 
''Confessions". Having a motive, however, for glancing back- 
wards briefly at that period in the present series, I will do so at 
this point. 

I saw in one journal an insinuation that the incidents in the 
preliminary narrative were possibly without foundation. To 
such an expression of mere gratuitous malignity, as it hap- 
pened to be supported by no one argument, except a remark, 
apparently absurd, but certainly false, I did not condescend to 
answer. In reality, the possibility had never occurred to me 
that any person of judgment would seriously suspect me of 
taking liberties with that part of the work, since, though no 
one of the parties concerned but myself stood in so central a 
position to the circumstances as to be acquainted with all of 
them, many were acquainted with each separate section of the 
memoir. Relays of witn'esses might have been summoned to 
mount guard, as it were, upon the accuracy of each particular 
in the whole succession of incidents; and some of these people 
had an interest, more or less strong, in exposing any deviation 
from the strictest letter of the truth, had it been in their power 
to do so. It is now twenty- two years since I saw the objection 
here alluded to, and in saying that I did not condescend to 
notice it, the reader must not find any reason for taxing me 
with a blamable haughtiness. But every man is entitled to be 
haughty when his veracity is impeached ; and still more when it 
is impeached by a dishonest objection, or, if not that, by an 
objection which argues a carelessness of attention almost 
amounting to dishonesty, in a case where it was meant to sus- 
tain an imputation of falsehood. Let a man read carelessly, if 
he will, but not where he is meaning to use his reading for a 
purpose of wounding another man's honour. Having thus, by 
twenty-two years' silence, sufficiently expressed my contempt 
for the slander,^ I now feel myself at liberty to draw it into 
notice, for the sake, inter alia, of showing in how rash a spirit 
malignity often works. In the preliminary account of certain 
boyish adventures which had exposed me to suffering of a kind 
not commonly incident to persons in my station in life, and 



174 DE QUINCEY 

leaving behind a temptation to the use of opium under certain 
arrears of weakness, I had occasion to notice a disreputable 
attorney in London, who showed me some attentions, partly 
on my own account as a boy of some expectations, but much 
more with the purpose of fastening his professional grappling- 

hooks upon the young Earl of A 1,^ my former companion, 

and my present correspondent. This man's house was slightly 
described, and, with more minuteness, I had exposed some 
interesting traits in his household economy. A question, there- 
fore, naturally arose in several people's curiosity — Where was 
this house situated? and the more so because I had pointed a 
renewed attention to it by saying, that on that very evening 
(namely, the evening on which that particular page of the 
"Confessions" was written) I had visited the street, looked up at 
the windows, and, instead of the gloomy desolation reigning 
there when myself and a little girl were the sole nightly ten- 
ants, — sleeping, in fact (poor freezing creatures that we both 
were), on the floor of the attorney's law-chamber, and making 
a pillow out of his infernal parchments, — I had seen, with 
pleasure, the evidences of comfort, respectability, and domestic 
animation, in the lights and stir prevailing through different 
stories of the house. Upon this, the upright critic told his 
readers that I had described the house as standing in Oxford 
Street, and then appealed to their own knowledge of that street 
whether such a house could be so situated. Why not — he 
neglected to tell us. The houses at the east end of Oxford 
Street are certainly of too small an order to meet my account 
of the attorney's house ; but why should it be at the east end ? 
Oxford Street is a mile and a quarter long, and, being built 
continuously on both sides, finds room for houses of many 
classes. Meantime it happens that, although the true house 
was most obscurely indicated, any house whatever in Oxford 
Street was most luminously excluded. In all the immensity 
of London there was but one single street that could be chal- 
lenged by an attentive reader of the ** Confessions " as peremp- 
torily not the street of the attorney's house, and that one was 
Oxford Street ; for, in speaking of my own renewed acquaint- 
ance with the outside of this house, I used some expression 
implying that, in order to make such a visit of reconnoissance, 
I had turned aside from Oxford Street. The matter is a per- 
fect trifle in itself, but it is no trifle in a question affecting a 
writer's accuracy. If in a thing so absolutely impossible to 
be forgotten as the true situation of a house painfully memor- 
able to a man's feehngs, from being the scene of boyish dis- 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 175 

tresses the most exquisite, nights passed in the misery of cold, 
and hunger preying upon him, both night and day, in a degree 
which very many would not have survived, — he, when retrac- 
ing his school-boy annals, could have shown indecision, even 
far more dreaded inaccuracy, in identifying the house, — not 
one syllable after that, which he could have said on any other 
subject, would have won any confidence, or deserved any, from 
a judicious reader. I may now mention — the Herod being 
dead whose persecutions I had reason to fear — that the house 
in question stands in Greek Street on the west, and is the house 
on that side nearest to Soho Square, but without looking into 
the square. This it was hardly safe to mention at the date of 
the published "Confessions". It was my private opinion, indeed, 
that there were probably twenty-five chances to one in favour 
of my friend the attorney having been by that time hanged. 
But then this argued inversely; one chance to twenty-five that 
my friend might be unhanged, and knocking about the streets 
of London; in which case it would have been a perfect god- 
send to him that here lay an opening (of my contrivance, not 
his) for requesting the opinion of a jury on the amount of sola- 
tium due to his wounded feelings in an action on the passage 
in the "Confessions". To have indicated even the street would 
have been enough; because' there could surely be but one such 
Grecian in Greek Street, or but one that realized the other con- 
ditions of the unknown quantity. There was also a separate 
danger not absolutely so laughable as it sounds. Me there 
was little chance that the attorney should meet; but my book 
he might easily have met (supposing always that the warrant of 
Sus. per coll. had not yet on his account travelled down to 
Newgate). For he was literary; admired literature; and, as a 
lawyer, he wrote on some subjects fluently; might he not pub- 
lish his "Confessions". Or, which would be worse, a supple- 
ment to mine, printed so as exactly to match ? In which case I 
should have had the same affliction that Gibbon the historian 
dreaded so much, namely, that of seeing a refutation of him- 
self, and his own answer to the refutation, all bound up in one 
and the same self-combating volume. Besides, he would have 
cross-examined me before the public, in Old Bailey style; no 
story, the most straightforward that ever was told, could be 
sure to stand that. And my readers might be left in a state of 
painful doubt whether he might not, after all, have been a model 
of suffering innocence — I (to say the kindest thing possible) 
plagued with the natural treacheries of a schoolboy's memory. 
In taking leave of this case and the remembrances connected 



176 DE QUINCEY 

with it, let me say that, although really believing in the prob- 
ability of the attorney's having at least found his way to Aus- 
tralia, I had no satisfaction in thinking of that result. I knew 
my friend to be the very perfection of a scamp. And in the 
running account between us (I mean, in the ordinary sense, as 
to money), the balance could not be in his favour; since I, on 
receiving a sum of money (considerable in the eyes of us both), 
had transferred pretty nearly the whole of it to him, for the 
purpose ostensibly held out to me (but of course a hoax) of 
purchasing certain law *' stamps ; " for he was then pursuing 
a diplomatic correspondence with various Jews who lent money 
to young heirs, in some trifling proportion on my own insig- 
nificant account, but much more truly on the account of Lord 

A 1, my young friend. On the other side, he had given to 

me simply the relics of his breakfast-table, which itself was 
hardly more than a relic. But in this he was not to blame. 
He could not give to me what he had not for himself, nor 
sometimes for the poor starving child whom I now suppose to 
have been his illegitimate daughter. So desperate was the run- 
ning fight, yard-arm to yard-arm, which he maintained with 
creditors fierce as famine and hungry as the grave, — so deep 
also was his horror (I know not for which of the various rea- 
sons supposable) against falling into a prison, — that he seldom 
ventured to sleep twice successively in the same house. That 
expense of itself must have pressed heavily in London, where 
you pay half a crown at least for a bed that would cost only a 
shilling in the provinces. In the midst of his knaveries, and, 
what were even more shocking to my remembrance, his con- 
fidential discoveries in his rambling conversations of knavish 
designs (not always pecuniary), there was a light of wandering 
misery in his eye, at times, which affected me afterwards at 
intervals, when I recalled it in the radiant happiness of nine- 
teen, and amidst the solemn tranquilities of Oxford. That of 
itself was interesting; the man was worse by far than he had 
been meant to be; he had not the mind that reconciles itself to 
evil. Besides, he respected scholarship, which appeared by the 
deference he generally showed to myself, then about seventeen; 
he had an interest in literature, — that argues something good; 
and was pleased at any time, or even cheerful, when I turned the 
conversation upon books; nay, he seemed touched with emo- 
tion when I quoted some sentiment noble and impassioned 
from one of the great poets, and would ask me to repeat it. 
He would have been a man of memorable energy, and for good 
purposes, had it not been for his agony of conflict with pecuni- 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS I 77 

ary embarrassments. These probably had commenced in some 
fatal compliance with temptation arising- out of funds confided 
to him by a client. Perhaps he had gained fifty g"uineas for 
a moment of necessity, and had sacrificed for that trifle only the 
serenity and the comfort of a life. Feelings of relenting kind- 
ness it was not in my nature to refuse in such a case; and I 
wished to. . . . But I never succeeded in tracing his 
steps through the wilderness of London until some years back, 
when I ascertained that he was dead. Generally speaking, the 
few people whom I have disliked in this world were flourishing 
people, of good repute. Whereas the knaves whom I have 
known, one and all, and by no means few, I think of with 
pleasure and kindness. 

Heavens! when I look back to the suflferings which I have 
witnessed or heard of, even from this one brief London experi- 
ence, I say, if life could throw open its long suites of chambers 
to our eyes from some station beforehand, — if, from some 
secret stand, we could look by anticipation along its vast cor- 
ridors, and aside into the recesses opening upon them from 
either hand, — halls of tragedy or chambers of retribution, sim- 
ply in that small wing and no more of the great caravanserai 
which we ourselves shall haunt, — simply in that narrow tract 
of time, and no more, where we ourselves shall range, and con- 
fining our gaze to those, and no others, for whom personally 
we shall be interested, — what a recoil we should suffer of 
horror in our estimate of life ! What if those sudden catastro- 
phes, or those inexpiable afflictions, which have already 
descended upon the people within my own knowledge, and 
almost below my own eyes, all of them now gone past, and 
some long past, had been thrown open before me as a secret 
exhibition when first I and they stood within the vestibule of 
morning hopes, — when the calamities themselves had hardly 
begun to gather in their elements of possibility and when some 
of the parties to them were as yet no more than infants! Tlie 
past viewed not as the past, but by a spectator who steps back 
ten years deeper into the rear, in order that he may regard it 
as a future; the calamity of 1840 contemplated from the station 
of 1830, — the doom that rang the knell of happiness viewed 
from a point of time when as yet it was neither feared nor 
would even have been intelligible, — the name that killed in 
1843, which in 1835 would have struck no vibration upon the 
heart, — the portrait that on the day of her Majesty's coronation 
would have been admired by you with a pure disinterested 
admiration, but which, if seen to-day, would draw forth an 
12 



178 DE QUINCEY 

involuntary groan, — cases such as these are strangely moving 
for all who add deep thoughtfulness to deep sensibility. As the 
hastiest of improvisations, accept, fair reader (for you it is that 
will chiefly feel such an invocation of the past), three or four 
illustrations of my own experience. 

Who is this distinguished-looking young woman, with her 
eyes drooping, and the shadow of a dreadful shock yet fresh 
upon every feature? Who is the elderly lady, with her eyes 
flashing fire? Who is the downcast child of sixteen? What 
is that torn paper lying at their feet? Who is the writer? 
Whom does the paper concern? Ah! if she, if the central 
figure in the group — twenty-two at the moment when she 
is revealed to us — could, on her happy birthday at sweet 
seventeen, have seen the image of herself five years onwards, 
just as we see it now, would she have prayed for life as for an 
absolute blessing? or would she not have prayed to be taken 
from the evil to come — to be taken away one evening, at 
least, before this day's sun arose? It is true, she still wears a 
look of gentle pride, and a relic of that noble smile which 
belongs to her that suffers an injury which many times over 
she would have died sooner than inflict. Womanly pride 
refuses itself before witnesses to the total prostration of the 
blow; but, for all that, you may see that she longs to be left 
alone, and that her tears will flow without restraint when she 
is so. This room is her pretty boudoir, in which, till to-night 
— poor thing! — she has been glad and happy. There stands 
her miniature conservatory, and there expands her miniature 
library ; as we circumnavigators of literature are apt (you know) 
to regard all female libraries in the light of miniatures. None 
of these will ever rekindle a smile on her face; and there, 
beyond, is her music, which only of all that she possesses will 
now become dearer to her than ever ; but not, as once, to feed 
a self-mocked pensiveness, or to cheat a half visionary sadness. 
She will be sad, indeed. But she is one of those that will suffer 
in silence. Nobody will ever detect her failing in any point 
of duty, or querulously seeking the support in others which 
she can find for herself in this solitary room. Droop she will 
not in the sight of men; and, for all beyond, nobody has any 
concern with that, except God. You shall hear what becomes 
of her, before we take our departure; but now let me tell you 
what has happened. In the main outline I am sure you guess 
already, without aid of mine, for we leaden-eyed men, in such 
cases, see nothing by comparison with you, our quick-witted 
sisters. That haughty-looking lady, with the Roman cast of 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 1 79 

an 



features, who must once have been strikingly handsome, 
Agrippina, even yet, in a favourable presentation— is the 
younger lady's aunt. She, it is rumoured, once sustained, in her 
younger days, some injury of that same cruel nature which has 
this day assailed her niece, and ever since she has worn an air 
of disdain, not altogether unsupported by real dignity towards 
men. This aunt it was that tore the letter which lies upon the 
floor. It deserved to be torn; and yet she that had the best 
right to do so would not have torn it. That letter was an 
elaborate attempt on the part of an accomplished young man 
to release himself from sacred engagements. What need was 
there to argue the case of such engagements? Could it have 
been requisite with pure female dignity to plead anything, or 
do more than look an indisposition to fulfil them? The aunt 
is now moving towards the door, which I am glad to see ; and 
she is followed by that pale, timid girl of sixteen, a cousin, who 
feels the case profoundly, but is too young and shy to offer an 
intellectual sympathy. ^ , i . • u. 

Only one person inthis world there is who could to-nignt 
have been a supporting friend to our young sufferer, and that 
is her dear, loving twin-sister, that for eighteen years read and 
wrote, thought and sang, slept and breathed, with the dividmg- 
door open forever between their bed-rooms, and never once a 
separation between their hearts ; but she is in a far-distant land. 
Who else is there at her call? Except God, nobody. Her 
aunt had somewhat sternly admonished her, though still with 
a relenting in her eye as she glanced aside at the expression in 
her niece's face, that she must " call pride to her assistance. 
Ay true; but pride, though a strong ally in public, is apt in 
private to turn as treacherous as the worst of those against 
whom she is invoked. How could it be dreamed by a person 
of sense that a brilliant young man, of merits various and 
eminent, in spite of his baseness, to whom for nearly two 
vears this young woman had given her whole confiding love, 
midit be dismissed from a heart like hers on the earliest sum- 
mons of pride, simply because she herself had been dismissed 
from his, or seemed to have been dismissed, on a summons o± 
mercenary calculation? Look! now that she is relieved from 
the weight of an unconfidential presence, she has sat for two 
hours with her head buried in her hands. At last she rises to 
look for something. A thought has struck her; and, takmg 
a little golden key which hangs by a chain withm her bosom, 
she searches for something locked up amongst her few jewels 
What is it? It is a Bible exquisitely illuminated, with a letter 



l8o DE QUINCEY 

attached by some pretty silken artifice to the blank leaves at 
the end. This letter is a beautiful record, wisely and patheti- 
cally composed, of maternal anxiety still burning strong in 
death, and yearning, when all objects beside were fast fading 
from her eyes, after one parting act of communion with the 
twin darlings of her heart. Both were thirteen years old, within 
a week or two, as on the night before her death they sat weep- 
ing by the bedside of their mother, and hanging on her lips, 
now for farewell whispers and now for farewell kisses. They 
both knew that, as her strength had permitted during the latter 
month of her life, she had thrown the last anguish of love in 
her beseeching heart into a letter of counsel to themselves. 
Through this, of which each sister had a copy, she trusted long 
to converse with her orphans. And the last promise which she 
had entreated on this evening from both was, that in either of 
two contingencies they would review her counsels, and the 
passages to which she pointed their attention in the Scriptures; 
namely, first, in the event of any calamity, that, for one sister 
or for both, should overspread their paths with total darkness ; 
and, secondly, in the event of life flowing in too profound a 
stream of prosperity, so as to threaten them with an alienation 
of interest from all spiritual objects. She had not concealed 
that, of these two extreme cases, she would prefer for her own 
children the first. And now had that case arrived, indeed, 
which she in spirit had desired to meet. Nine years ago, just 
as the silvery voice of a dial in the dying lady's bed-room was 
striking nine, upon a summer evening, had the last visual ray 
streamed from her seeking eyes upon her orphan twins, after 
which, throughout the night, she had slept away into heaven. 
Now again had come a summer evening memorable for unhap- 
piness; now again the daughter thought of those dying lights 
of love which streamed at sunset from the closing eyes of her 
mother; again, and just as she went back in thought to this 
image, the same silvery voice of the dial sounded nine o'clock. 
Again she remembered her mother's dying request; again her 
own tear-hallowed promise, — and with her heart in her 
mother's grave she now rose to fulfil it. Here, then, when this 
solemn recurrence to a testamentary counsel has ceased to be a 
mere office of duty towards the departed, having taken the 
shape of a consolation for herself, let us pause. 

Now, fair companion in this exploring voyage of inquest 
into hidden scenes, or forgotten scenes of human life, perhaps 
it might be instructive to direct our glasses upon the false. 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS l8l 

perfidious lover. It might. But do not let us do so. We 
mifrht like him better, or pity him more, than either ot us 
would desire His nai^e and memory have long since dropped 
out of everybody's thoughts. Of prosperity, and (what is more 
topo tant of internal peace, he is reputed to have had no gleani 
fZ the moment when he betrayed his faith and m one day 
threw away the jewel of good conscience, ^n^ a pearl richer 
than all his tribe." But, however that may be, it is certain 
ha? finally, he became a wreck; and of any hopeless wreck it 
Is pkinful to talk,- much more so, when through him others 

''ih^rwT rhen,'after an interval of nearly two years has 
passed over' the young lady in the boudoir, look in again upon 
Ter ' You 1 esitlte, fair friend ; and I myself hesitate. For in 
fact" she also has become a wreck; and it would grieve us both 
to see her altered. At the end of twenty-one months she 
ret^ns hardly a vestige of resemblance to the fine young woman 
w Taw on fhat unhlppy evening, with her aunt and cousin 

?ur ^g^aslSfh -S-^' rpointt ~i"3 

Krgrave^rd°pllJS^rh:^^^^^^^^^ 
s that Aough no change- can restore the ravages of the past, 
yVfalfteufs found to Lppen with yo«ng persons) the expre - 
sion has revived from her girlish years. TJe child like aspect 
V,^« revolved and settled back upon her features, ihe wasting 
^wav 0° the 'flesh fs less apparent in the face; and one might 
Sne that fn this sweet m^a^rble countenance was seen th^^^^^^^^ 

living countenance had taken their flight 'orever, on tna 
memorable evening when, we looked '","P°" ^^^^P^e °ym- 
group.-upon the towermg and denouncing aunt the sym 
pathizing but silent cousin, the poor, blighted mece, ana me 
-Snit^Vl ^,"evStfu:\ry^utg creature and her 
bliSed'l^^es, close up ag.^^^^^^^^^ 
r trcVa'ngesThr^h'rhiu ?oncealest within thy draperies. 



1 82 DE QUINCEY 

Once more, " open sesame ! " and show us a third generation. 
Behold a lawn islanded with thickets. How perfect is the 
verdure; how rich the blossoming shrubberies that screen with 
verdurous walls from the possibility of intrusion, whilst by 
their own wandering line of distribution they shape, and 
umbrageously embay, what one might call lawny saloons and 
vestibules, sylvan galleries and closets ! Some of these recesses, 
which unlink themselves as fluently as snakes, and unexpect- 
edly as the shyest nooks, watery cells, and crypts, amongst the 
shores of a forest-lake, being formed by the mere caprices and 
ramblings of the luxuriant shrubs, are so small and so quiet 
that one might fancy them meant for boudoirs. Here is one 
that in a less fickle climate would make the loveliest of studies 
for a writer of breathings from some solitary heart, or of sus- 
piria from some impassioned memory! And, opening from 
one angle of this embowered study, issues a little narrow cor- 
ridor, that, after almost wheeling back upon itself, in its play- 
ful mazes, finally widens into a little circular chamber; out of 
which there is no exit (except back again by the entrance), 
small or great; so that, adjacent to his study, the writer would 
command how sweet a bed-room, permitting him to lie the 
summer through, gazing all night long at the burning host 
of heaven. How silent that would be at the noon of summer 
nights — how grave-like in its quiet! And yet, need there be 
asked a stillness or a silence more profound than is felt at this 
present noon of day? One reason for such peculiar repose, 
over and above the tranquil character of the day, and the dis- 
tance of the place from the highroads, is the outer zone of 
woods, which almost on every quarter invests the shrubberies, 
swathing them (as one may express it), belting them and over- 
looking them, from a varying distance of two and three fur- 
longs, so as oftentimes to keep the winds at a distance. But, 
however caused and supported, the silence of these fanciful 
lawns and lawny chambers is oftentimes oppressive in the 
depths of summer to people unfamiliar with solitudes, either 
mountainous or sylvan; and many would be apt to suppose that 
the villa, to which these pretty shrubberies form the chief 
dependencies, must be untenanted. But that is not the case. 
The house is inhabited, and by its own legal mistress, the pro- 
prietress of the whole domain; and not at all a silent mistress, 
but as noisy as most little ladies of five years old, for that is her 
age. Now, and just as we are speaking, you may hear her 
little, joyous clamour as she issues from the house. This way 
she comes, bounding like a fawn; and soon she rushes into the 



SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 1 83 

little recess which I pointed out as a proper study for any man 
who should be weaving the deep harmonies of memorial sus- 
piria. But I fancy that she will soon dispossess it of that char- 
acter, for het suspiria are not many at this stage of her life. 
Now she comes dancing into sight; and you see that, if she 
keeps the promise of her infancy, she will be an interesting 
creature to the eye in after life. In other respects, also, she is 
an engaging child, — loving, natural, and wild as any one of 
her neighbours for some miles round, namely, leverets, squirrels, 
and ring-doves. But what will surprise you most is, that, 
although a child of pure English blood, she speaks very little 
English; but more Bengalee than perhaps you will find it con- 
venient to construe. That is her ayah, who comes up from 
behind, at a pace so different from her youthful mistress's. 
But, if their paces are different, in other things they agree 
most cordially ; and dearly they love each other. In reality, the 
child has passed her whole life in the arms of this ayah. She 
remembers nothing elder than her; eldest of things is the ayah 
in her eyes; and, if the ayah should insist on her worshipping 
herself as the goddess Railroadina or Steamboatina, that made 
England, and the sea, and Bengal, it is certain that the little 
thing would do so, asking no question but this, — whether kiss- 
ing would do for worshipping. 

Every evening at nine o'clock, as the ayah sits by the little 
creature lying awake in bed, the silvery tongue of a dial tolls 
the hour. Reader, you know who she is. She is the grand- 
daughter of her that faded away about sunset in gazing at her 
twin orphans. Her name is Grace. And she is the niece of 
that elder and once happy Grace, who spent so much of her 
happiness in this very room, but whom, in her utter desolation, 
we saw in the boudoir, with the torn letter at her feet. She 
is the daughter of that other sister, wife to a military officer who 
died abroad. Little Grace never saw her grandmamma, nor 
her lovely aunt, that was her namesake, nor consciously her 
mamma. She was born six months after the death of the elder 
Grace; and her mother saw her only through the mists of mor- 
tal suffering, which carried her off three weeks after the birth 
of her daughter. 

This view was taken several years ago; and since then the 
younger Grace, in her turn, is under a cloud of affiiction. But 
she is still under eighteen; and of her there may be hopes. 
Seeing such things in so short a space of years, for the grand- 
mother died at thirty-two, we say, — Death we can face : but 
knowing, as some of us do, what is human life, which of us is 



184 I)E QUINCEY 

it that without shuddering could (if consciously we were sum- 
moned) face the hour of birth? 

Notes 

* Being almost constantly an absentee from London, and very often 
from other great cities, so as to command oftentimes no favourable 
opportunities for overlooking the great mass of pubHc journals, it 
is possible enough that other slanders of the same tenor may have 
existed. I speak of what met my own eye, or was accidentally reported 
to me; but, in fact, all of us are exposed to this evil of calumnies 
lurking unseen, for no degree of energy, and no excess of disposable 
time would enable any man to exercise this sort of vigilant police over 
all journals. Better, therefore, tranquilly to leave all such malice to 
confound itself. 

* Earl of Altamont. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 



THE GLORY OF MOTION 

SOME twenty or more yea" before I matrMated at 
Oxford Mr Palmer, at that time M. F. for uatn, nau 

to a circumstantial notice from mysdf ^avmg had soja g 
share in developing the anarch.es of my subsequent ar ,. 
agency which they accomphshed first, through^^^^^ J^ 
at that time unprecedented- for tney ^^^ 

glory of motion; =^.~f y- *X^ dafkness upon solitary 
eye between lamp-light and tne aarKn y 

Tt' K^'theTlfs's ThorseTs^cted^r this mail 
S^fourth^! l^ugh the conscious P-ence of^^a 

central intellect that, '" ^^ 1^'^*^^°;, Jed a" °b^'^^l^^ 
-of storms, of darkness, o^/f &^[. r,^;3„it por my own 
into one steady co-operation to a "/l /f ^"- ^^^e mighty 
feeling, ^is post-office service spoke a y^^ ^j,, ,,ding 

orchestra, where a *?"5^^"^J"„f discord yet all obedient 



I 88 DE QUINCEY 

that particular element in this whole combination which 
most impressed myself, and through which it is that to this 
hour Mr. Palmer's mail-coach system tyrannizes, over my 
dreams, by terror and terrific beauty, lay in the awful politi- 
cal mission which at that time it fulfilled. The mail- 
coach it was that distributed over the face of the land, like the 
opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news of Trafal- 
gar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. These were the 
harvests that, in the grandeur of their reaping, redeemed the 
tears and blood in which they had been sown. Neither was the 
meanest peasant so much below the grandeur and the sorrow 
of the times as to confound battles such as these, which were 
gradually moulding the destinies of Christendom, with the vul- 
gar conflicts of ordinary warfare, so often no more than gladia- 
torial trials of national prowess. The victories of England in 
this stupendous contest rose of themselves as natural Te Deums 
to heaven ; and it was felt by the thoughtful that such victories, 
at such a crisis of general prostration, were not more beneficial 
to ourselves than finally to France, our enemy, and to the 
nations of all western or central Europe, through whose pusil- 
lanimity it was that the French domination had prospered. 

The mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing these 
mighty events thus diffusively influential, became itself a spirit- 
ualized and glorified object to an impassioned heart; and nat- 
urally, in the Oxford of that day, all hearts were impassioned, 
as being all (or nearly all) in early manhood. In most universi- 
ties there is one single college; in Oxford there were five-and- 
twenty, all of which were peopled by young men, the elite of 
their own generation ; not boys, but men ; none under eighteen. 
In some of these many colleges, the custom permitted the stu- 
dent to keep what are called ''short terms;" that is, the four 
terms of Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, and Act, were kept by a 
residence, in the aggregate of ninety-one days, or thirteen 
weeks. Under this interrupted residence, it was possible that a 
student might have a reason for going down to his home four 
times in a year. This made eight journeys to and fro. But, 
as the homes lay dispersed through all the shires of the island, 
and most of us disdained all coaches except his majesty's mail, 
no city out of London could pretend to so extensive a connec- 
tion with Mr. Palmer's establishment as Oxford. Three mails, 
at the least, I remember as passing every day through Oxford, 
and benefiting by my personal patronage — viz., the Worcester, 
the Gloucester, and the Holyhead mail. Naturally, therefore, 
it became a point of some interest with us, whose journeys 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH 189 

revolved every six weeks on an average, to look a little into 
the executive details of the system. With some of these 
Mr. Palmer had no concern ; they rested upon bye-laws enacted 
by posting-houses for their own benefit, and upon other bye- 
laws, equally stern, enacted by the inside passengers for the 
illustration of their own haughty exclusiveness. These last 
were of a nature to rouse our scorn, from which the transition 
was not very long to systematic mutiny. Up to this time, say 
1804, or 1805 (the year of Trafalgar), it had been the fixed 
assumption of the four inside people (as an old tradition of all 
public carriages derived from the reign of Charles II), that 
they, the illustrious quaternion, constituted a porcelain variety 
of the human race, whose dignity would have been compro- 
mised by exchanging one word of civility with the three miser- 
able delf-ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider, 
might have been held to attaint the foot concerned in that 
operation; so that, perhaps, it would have required an act of 
parliament to restore its purity of blood. What words, then, 
could express the horror, and the sense of treason, in that case, 
which had happened, where all three outsides (the trinity of 
Pariahs) made a vain attempt to sit down at the same break- 
fast-table or dinner- table with the consecrated four? I myself 
witnessed such an attempt'; and on that occasion a benevolent 
old gentleman endeavoured to soothe his three holy associates, 
by suggesting that, if the outsides were indicted for this crim- 
inal attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a 
case of lunacy, or delirium tremens, rather than of treason. 
England owes much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristo- 
cratic element in her social composition, when pulling against 
her strong democracy. I am not the man to laugh at it. But 
sometimes, undoubtedly, it expressed itself in comic shapes. 
The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the particular 
attempt which I have noticed, was, that the waiter, beckoning 
them away from the privileged salle-a-manger, sang out, "This 
way, my good men," and then enticed these good men away 
to the kitchen. But that place had not always answered. 
Sometimes, though rarely, cases occurred where the intruders, 
being stronger than usual, or more vicious than usual, reso- 
lutely refused to budge, and so far carried their point, as to 
have a separate table arranged for themselves in a corner of 
the general room. Yet, if an Indian screen could be found 
ample enough to plant them out from the very eyes of the high 
table, or dais, it then became possible to assume as a fiction of 
law — that the three delf fellows, after all, were not present. 



190 DE QUINCEY 

They could be ignored by the porcelain men, under the maxim, 
that objects not appearing-, and not existing, are governed by 
the same logical construction/ 

Such being, at that time, the usages of mail-coaches, what 
was to be done by us of young Oxford? We, the most aristo- 
cratic of people, who were addicted to the practice of looking 
down superciliously even upon the insides themselves as often 
very questionable characters — were we, by voluntarily going 
outside, to court indignities? If our dress and bearing sheltered 
us, generally, from the suspicion of being *' raff " (the name at 
that period for *' snobs " ^), we really were such constructively, 
by the place we assumed. If we did not submit to the deep 
shadow of eclipse, we entered at least the skirts of its penumbra. 
And the analogy of theatres was valid against us, where no man 
can complain of the annoyances incident to the pit or gallery, 
having his instant remedy in paying the higher price of the 
boxes. But the soundness of this analogy we disputed. In 
the case of the theatre, it cannot be pretended that the inferior 
situations have any separate attractions, unless the pit may be 
supposed to have an advantage for the purposes of the critic or 
the dramatic reporter. But the critic or reporter is a rarity. 
For most people, the sole benefit is in the price. Now, on the 
contrary, the outside of the mail had its own incommunicable 
advantages. These we could not forego. The higher price 
we would willingly have paid, but not the price connected with 
the condition of riding inside; which condition we pronounced 
insufferable. The air, the freedom of prospect, the proximity 
to the horses, the elevation of seat — these were what we 
required; but, above all, the certain anticipation of purchasing 
occasional opportunities of driving. 

Such was the difficulty which pressed us; and under the 
coercion of this difficulty, we instituted a searching inquiry into 
the true quality and valuation of the different apartments about 
the mail. We conducted this inquiry on metaphysical prin- 
ciples ; and it was ascertained satisfactorily, that the roof of the 
coach, which by some weak men had been called the attics, and 
by some the garrets, was in reality the drawing-room; in 
which drawing-room the box was the chief ottoman or sofa; 
whilst it appeared that the inside, which had been traditionally 
regarded as the only room tenantable by gentlemen, was, in 
fact, the coal-cellar in disguise. 

Great wits jump. The very same idea had not long before 
struck the celestial intellect of China. Amongst the presents 
carried out by our first embassy to that country was a state- 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 191 

coach. It had been specially selected as a personal gift by 
George III; but the exact mode of using it was an immense 
mystery to Pekin. The ambassador, indeed (Lord Macartney), 
had made some imperfect explanations upon this point; but, as 
his excellency communicated these in a diplomatic whisper, at 
the very moment of his departure, the celestial intellect was 
very feebly illuminated, and it became necessary to call a cab- 
inet council on the grand state question, " Where was the 
emperor to sit? " The hammer-cloth happened to be unusu- 
ally gorgeous ; and partly on that consideration, but partly also 
because the box offered the most elevated seat, was nearest to 
the moon, and undeniably went foremost, it was resolved by 
acclamation that the box was the imperial throne, and for the 
scoundrel who drove, he might sit where he could find a perch. 
The horses, therefore, being harnessed, solemnly his imperial 
majesty ascended his new English throne under a flourish of 
trumpets, having the first lord of the treasury on his right hand, 
and the chief jester on his left. Pekin gloried in the spectacle ; 
and in the whole flowery people, constructively present by rep- 
resentation, there v/as but one discontented person, and that 
was the coachman. This mutinous individual audaciously 
shouted, "Where am I to sit?" But the privy council, 
incensed by his disloyalty, .unanimously opened the door, and 
kicked him into the inside. He had all the inside places to 
himself; but such is the rapacity of ambition, that he was still 
dissatisfied. ** I say," he cried out in an extempore petition, 
addressed to the emperor through the window — "I say, how 
am I to catch hold of the reins?" — "Anyhow," was the 
imperial answer; " don't trouble me, man, in my glory. How 
catch the reins? Why, through the windows, through the 
keyholes — anyhow." Finally this contumacious coachman 
lengthened the check-strings into a sort of jury-reins, com- 
municating with the horses ; with these he drove as steadily as 
Pekin had any right to expect. The emperor returned after 
the briefest of circuits; he descended in great pomp from his 
throne with the severest resolution never to remount it. A 
public thanksgiving was ordered for his majesty's happy 
escape from the disease of broken neck; and the state-coach 
was dedicated thenceforward as a votive offering to the god 
" Fo Fo " — whom the learned more accurately called " Fi Fi." 
A revolution of this same Chinese character did young 
Oxford of that era effect in the constitution of mail-coach 
society. It was a perfect French revolution; and we had good 
reason to say, ga ira. In fact, it soon became too popular. 



192 DE QUINCEY 

The "public," a well-known character, particularly disagree- 
able, though slightly respectable, and notorious for affecting 
the chief seats in synagogues — had at first loudly opposed this 
revolution; but when the opposition showed itself to be inef- 
fectual, our disagreeable friend went into it with headlong zeal. 
At first it was a sort of race between us ; and, as the public is 
usually from thirty to fifty years old, naturally we of young 
Oxford, that averaged about twenty, had the advantage. Then 
the public took to bribing, giving fees to horse-keepers, etc., 
who hired out their persons as warming-pans on the box-seat. 
That, you know, was shocking to all moral sensibilities. Come 
to bribery, said we, and there is an end to all morality, Aris- 
totle's, Zeno's, Cicero's, or anybody's. And, besides, of what 
use was it? For we bribed also. And as our bribes to those 
of the public were as five shillings to sixpence, here again 
young Oxford had the advantage. But the contest was ruin- 
ous to the principles of the stables connected with the mails. 
This whole corporation was constantly bribed, rebribed, and 
often sur- rebribed ; a mail-coach yard was like the hustings in a 
contested election; and a horse-keeper, hostler, or helper, was 
held by the philosophical at that time to be the most corrupt 
character in the nation. 

There was an impression upon the public mind, natural 
enough from the continually augmenting velocity of the mail, 
but quite erroneous, that an outside seat on this class of car- 
riages was a post of danger. On the contrary, I maintained 
that, if a man had become nervous from some gipsy prediction 
in his childhood, allocating to a particular moon now approach- 
ing some unknown danger, and he should inquire earnestly, 
" Whither can I fly for shelter? Is a prison the safest retreat? 
or a lunatic hospital? or the British Museum?" I should have 
replied, " Oh, no; I'll tell you what to do. Take lodgings for 
the next forty days on the box of his majesty's mail. Nobody 
can touch you there. If it is by bills at ninety days after date 
that you are made unhappy — if noters and protesters are the 
sort of wretches whose astrological shadows darken the house 
of life — then note you what I vehemently protest — viz., that 
no matter though the sheriff and under-sheriff in every county 
should be running after you with his posse, touch a hair of 
your head he cannot whilst you keep house, and have your legal 
domicile on the box of the mail. It is felony to stop the mail ; 
even the sheriff cannot do that. And an extra touch of the 
whip to the leaders (no great matter if it grazes the sheriff) 
at any time guarantees your safety." In fact, a bedroom in a 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 193 

quiet house seems a safe enough retreat, yet it is Hable to its 
own notorious nuisances — to robbers by night, to rats, to fire. 
But the mail laughs at these terrors. To robbers, the answer 
is packed up and ready for delivery in the barrel of the guard's- 
blunderbuss. Rats again ! — there are none about mail- 
coaches, any more than snakes in Von Troll's 'Tceland;"^ except, 
indeed, now and then a parliamentary rat, who always hides his 
shame in what I have shown to be the " coal-cellar." And as 
to fire, I never knew but one in a mail-coach, which was in the 
Exeter mail, and caused by an obstinate sailor bound to Devon- 
port. Jack, making light of the law and the lawgiver that had 
set their faces against his offence, insisted on taking up a for- 
bidden seat* in the rear of the roof, from which he could 
exchange his own yarns with those of the guard. No greater 
offence was then known to mail-coaches; it was treason, it was 
laesa majestas, it was by tendency arson; and the ashes of Jack's 
pipe, falling amongst the straw of the hinder boot containing 
the mail- bags, raised a flame which (aided by the wind of our 
motion) threatened a revolution in the republic of letters. Yet 
even this left the sanctity of the box unviolated. In dignified 
repose, the coachman and myself sat on, resting with benign 
composure upon our knowledge that the fire would have to 
burn its way through four inside passengers before it could 
reach ourselves. I remarked to the coachman, with a quota- 
tion from Virgil's " ^neid " really too hackneyed — 

"Jam proximus ardet 
Ucalegon." 

But, recollecting that the Virgilian part of the coachman's edu- 
cation might have been neglected, I interpreted so far as to say, 
that perhaps at that moment the flames were catching hold of 
our worthy brother and inside passenger, Ucalegon. The 
coachman made no answer, which is my own way when a 
stranger addresses me either in Syriac or in Coptic, but by his 
faint sceptical smile he seemed to insinuate that he knew better; 
for that Ucalegon, as it happened, was not in the way-bill, and 
therefore could not have been booked. 

No dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself 
with the mysterious. The connection of the mail with the 
state and the executive government — a connection obvious, 
but yet not strictly defined — gave to the whole mail estab- 
lishment an official grandeur which did us service on the roads, 
and invested us with seasonable terrors. Not the less impressive 
were those terrors, because their legal limits were imperfectly 

13 



194 DE QUINCEY 

ascertained. Look at those turnpike gates, with what deferen- 
tial hurry, with what an obedient start, they fly open at our 
approach! Look at that long Hne of carts and carters ahead, 
audaciously usurping the very crest of the road. Ah! traitors, 
they do not hear us as yet; but, as soon as the dreadful blast 
of our horn reaches them with proclamation of our approach, 
see with what frenzy of trepidation they fly to their horses' 
heads, and deprecate our wrath by the precipitation of their 
crane-neck quarterings. Treason they feel to be their crime; 
each individual carter feels himself under the ban of confiscation 
and attainder; his blood is attainted through six generations; 
and nothing is wanting but the headsman and his axe, the 
block and the saw-dust, to close up the vista of his horrors. 
What! shall it be within benefit of clergy to delay the king's 
message on the high road? — to interrupt the great respirations, 
ebb and flood, systole and diastole, of the national intercourse? 
— to endanger the safety of tidings, running day and night 
between all nations and languages? Or can it be fancied, 
amongst the weakest of men, that the bodies of the criminals 
will be given up to their widows for Christian burial? Now 
the doubts which were raised as to our powers did more to 
wrap them in terror, by wrapping them in uncertainty, than 
could have been effected by the sharpest definitions of the law 
from the Quarter Sessions. We, on our parts (we, the col- 
lective mail, I mean), did our utmost to exalt the idea of our 
privileges by the insolence with which we wielded them. 
Whether this insolence rested upon law that gave it a sanc- 
tion, or upon conscious power that haughtily dispensed with 
that sanction, equally it spoke from a potential station :■ and the 
agent, in each particular insolence of the moment, was viewed 
reverentially, as one having authority. 

Sometimes after breakfast his majesty's mail would become 
frisky; and in its difficult wheeHngs amongst the intricacies of 
early markets, it would upset an apple-cart, a cart loaded with 
eggs, etc. Huge was the affliction and dismay, awful was the 
smash. I, as far as possible, endeavoured in such a case to rep- 
resent the conscience and moral sensibilities of the mail; and, 
when wildernesses of eggs were lying poached under our 
horses' hoofs, then would I stretch forth my hands in sorrow 
saying (in words too celebrated at that time, from the false 
echoes* of Marengo), "Ah! wherefore have we not time to weep 
over you?" which was evidently impossible, since, in fact, we 
had not time to laugh over them. Tied to post-office allow- 
ance, in some cases of fifty minutes for eleven miles, could the 



THE ENGLISH MAH-COACH 195 

royal mail pretend to undertake the offices of sympathy and 
condolence? Could it be expected to provide tears for the 
accidents of the road? If even it seemed to trample on human- 
ity, it did so, I felt, in discharge of its own more peremptory 
duties. 

Upholding the morality of the mail, a fortiori I upheld its 
rights; as a matter of duty, I stretched to the uttermost its 
privilege of imperial precedency, and astonished weak minds 
by the feudal powers which I hinted to be lurking construc- 
tively in the charters of this proud establishment. Once I 
remember being on the box of the Holyhead mail, between 
Shrewsbury and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Bir- 
mingham, some " Tallyho " or " Highflyer," all flaunting with 
green and gold, came up alongside of us. What a contrast to 
our royal simplicity of form and colour in this plebian wretch ! 
The single ornament on our dark ground of chocolate colour was 
the mighty shield of the imperial arms, but emblazoned in pro- 
portions as modest as a signet-ring bears to a seal of office. 
Even this was displayed only on a single panel, whispering, 
rather than proclaiming, our relations to the mighty state; 
whilst the beast from Birmingham, our green-and-gold friend 
from false, fleeting, perjured Brummagem, had as much 
writing and painting on its sprawling flanks as would have 
puzzled a decipherer from the tombs of Luxor. For some 
time this Birmingham machine ran along by our side — a 
piece of familiarity that already of itself seemed to me suf- 
ficiently Jacobinical. But all at once a movement of the horses 
announced a desperate intention of leaving us behind. " Do 
you see that? " I said to the coachman. — " I see," was his short 
answer. He was wide awake, yet he waited longer than seemed 
prudent; for the horses of our audacious opponent had a dis- 
agreeable air of freshness and power. But his motive was 
loyal; his wish was, that the Birmingham conceit should be 
full-blown before he froze it. When that seemed right, he 
unloosed, or, to speak by a stronger word, he sprang, his 
known resources: he slipped our royal horses like cheetahs, or 
hunting-leopards, after the affrighted game. How they could 
retain such a reserve of fiery power after the work they had 
accomplished, seemed hard to explain. But on our side, 
besides the physical superiority, was a tower of moral strength, 
namely, the king's name, " which they upon the adverse faction 
wanted." Passing them without an effort, as it seemed, we 
threw them into the rear with so lengthening an interval 
between us, as proved in itself the bitterest mockery of their 



ig6 DE QUINCEY 

presumption; whilst our guard blew back a shattering blast 
of triumph, that was really too painfully full of derision. 

I mention this little incident for its connection with what 
followed. A Welsh rustic, sitting behind me, asked if I had 
not felt my heart burn within me during the progress of the 
race? I said, with philosophic calmness, No; because we were 
not racing with a mail, so that no glory could be gained. In 
fact, it was sufhciently mortifying that such a Birmingham 
thing should dare to challenge us. The Welshman replied, that 
he didn't see that; for that a cat might look at a king, and a 
Brummagem coach might lawfully race the Holyhead mail. 
" Race us, if you like,'' I replied, " though even that has an air 
of sedition, but not beat us. This would have been treason; 
and for its own sake I am glad that the ' Tallyho ' was dis- 
appointed." So dissatisfied did the Welshman seem with this 
opinion, that at last I was obliged to tell him a very fine story 
from one of our elder dramatists — viz., that once, in some far 
oriental kingdom, when the sultan of all the land, with his 
princes, ladies, and chief omrahs, were flying their falcons, a 
hawk suddenly flew at a majestic eagle; and in defiance of the 
eagle's natural advantages, in contempt also of the eagle's tra- 
ditional royalty, and before the whole assembled field of aston- 
ished spectators from Agra, and Lahore, killed the eagle on 
the spot. Amazement seized the sultan at the unequal contest, 
and burning admiration for its unparalleled result. He com- 
manded that the hawk should be brought before him; he 
caressed the bird with enthusiasm; and he ordered that for the 
commemoration of his matchless courage, a diadem of gold 
and rubies should be solemnly placed on the hawk's head; but 
then that, immediately after this solemn coronation, the bird 
should be led ofif to execution, as the most valiant indeed of 
traitors, but not the less a traitor, as having dared to rise rebel- 
liously against his liege lord and anointed sovereign, the eagle. 
" Now," said I to the Welshman, " to you and me, as men of 
refined sensibilities, how painful it would have been that this 
poor Brummagem brute, the ' Tallyho,' in the impossible case 
of a victory over us, should have been crowned with Birming- 
ham tinsel, with paste diamonds, and Roman pearls, and then 
led off to instant execution." The Welshman doubted if that 
would be warranted by law. And when I hinted at the 6th of 
Edward Longshanks, chap. i8, for regulating the precedency 
of coaches, as being probably the statute relied on for the 
capital punishment of such ofifences, he replied drily, that if the 
attempt to pass a mail really were treasonable, it was a pity 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH 1 97 

that the " Tallyho " appeared to have so imperfect an acquaint- 
ance with law. 

The modern modes of travelHng cannot compare with the 
old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of 
more velocity, not, however, as a consciousness, but as a fact 
of our Hfeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence; as, for 
instance, because somebody says that we have gone fifty miles 
in the hour, though we are far from feeling it as a personal 
experience, or upon the evidence of a result, as that actually 
we find ourselves in York four hours after leaving London. 
Apart from such an assertion, or such a result, I myself am 
little aware of the pace. But, seated on the old mail-coach, 
we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. 
On this system the word was, "Non magna loquimur," as upon 
railways, but "vivimus." Yes, ''magna vivimus;" we do not 
make verbal ostentation of our grandeurs, we realize our 
grandeurs in act, and in the very experience of life. The vital 
experience of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impos- 
sible on the question of our speed; we heard our speed, we 
saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the pro- 
duct of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, 
but was incarnated in the f^ery eyeballs of the noblest amongst 
brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder- 
beating hoofs. The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in 
the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such 
a movement : the glory of Salamanca, might be the first. But 
the intervening links that connected them, that spread the 
earthquake of battle into the eyeball of the horse, were the 
heart of man and its electric thrillings — kindling in the rapture 
of the fiery strife, and then propagating its own tumults by 
contagious shouts and gestures to the heart of his servant the 
horse. 

But now, on the new system of travelling, iron tubes and 
boilers have disconnected man's heart from the ministers of 
his locomotion. Nile nor Trafalgar has power to raise an extra 
bubble in a steam-kettle. The galvanic cycle is broken up for 
ever; man's imperial nature no longer sends itself forward 
through the electric sensibility of the horse; the inter-agencies 
are gone in the mode of communication between the horse and 
his master, out of which grew so many aspects of sublimity 
under accidents of mists that hid, or sudden blazes that revealed, 
of mobs that agitated, or midnight solitudes that awed. Tid- 
ings, fitted to convulse all nations, must henceforwards travel 
by culinary process ; and the trumpet that once announced from 



198 DE QUINCEY 

afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking, when heard screaming 
on the wind, and proclaiming itself through the darkness to 
every village or solitary house on its route, has now given way 
for ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler. 

Thus have perished multiform openings for public expres- 
sions of interest, scenical yet natural, in great national tidings; 
for revelations of faces and groups that could not offer them- 
selves amongst the fluctuating mobs of a railway station. The 
gatherings of gazers about a laurelled mail had one centre, and 
acknowledged one sole interest. But the crowds attending at 
a railway station have as little unity as running water and own 
as many centres as there are separate carriages in the train. 

How else, for example, than as a constant watcher for the 
dawn, and for the London mail that in summer months entered 
about daybreak amongst the lawny thickets of Marlborough 
forest, couldst thou, sweet Fanny of the Bath road, have 
become the glorified inmate of my dreams ? Yet Fanny, as the 
loveliest young woman for face and person that perhaps in my 
whole life I have beheld, merited the station which even now, 
from a distance of forty years, she holds in my dreams; yes, 
though by links of natural association she brings along with 
her a troop of dreadful creatures, fabulous and not fabulous, 
that are more abominable to the heart, than Fanny and the 
dawn are delightful. 

Miss Fanny of the Bath road, strictly speaking, lived at a 
mile's distance from the road ; but came so continually to meet 
the mail, that I on my frequent transits rarely missed her, and 
naturally connected her image with the great thoroughfare 
where only I had ever seen her. Why she came so punctually, 
I do not exactly know ; but I believe with some burden of com- 
missions to be executed in Bath, which had gathered to her own 
residence as a central rendezvous for converging them. The 
mail-coachman who drove the Bath mail, and wore the royal 
livery," happened to be Fanny's grandfather. A good man 
he was, that loved his beautiful granddaughter; and, loving her 
wisely, was vigilant over her deportment in any case where 
young Oxford might happen to be concerned. Did my vanity 
then suggest that I myself, individually, could fall within the 
line of his terrors? Certainly not, as regarded any physical 
pretensions that I could plead; for Fanny (as a chance passen- 
ger from her own neighbourhood once told me) counted in her 
train a hundred and ninety-nine professed admirers, if not open 
aspirants to her favour; and probably not one of the whole 
brigade but excelled myself in personal advantages. Ulysses 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 199 

even, with the unfair advantage of his accursed bow, could 
hardly have undertaken that amount of suitors. So the danger 
might have .seemed slight — only that woman is universally 
aristocratic; it is amongst her nobilities of heart that she is so. 
Now,the aristocratic distinctions in my favour might easily with 
Miss Fanny have compensated my physical deficiencies. Did 
I then make love to Fanny? Why, yes; about as much love 
as one could make whilst the mail was changing horses — a 
process which, ten years later, did not occupy above eighty 
seconds; but then — viz., about Waterloo — it occupied five 
times eighty. Now, four hundred seconds offer a field quite 
ample enough for whispering into a young woman's ear a 
great deal of truth, and (by way of parenthesis) some trifle of 
falsehood. Grandpapa did right, therefore, to watch me. And 
yet, as happens too often to the grandpapas of earth, in a con- 
test with the admirers of granddaughters, how vainly would 
he have watched me had I meditated any evil whispers to 
Fanny! She, it is my belief, would have protected herself 
against any man's evil suggestions. But he, as the result 
showed, could not have intercepted the opportunities for such 
suggestions. Yet, why not? Was he not active? Was he 
not blooming? Blooming he was as Fanny herself. 

" Say, all our praises why should lords " 

Stop, that's not the line. 

" Say, all are roses why should girls engross? " 

The coachman showed rosy blossoms on his face deeper even 
than his granddaughter's — his being drawn from the ale cask, 
Fanny's from the fountains of the dawn. But, in spite of his 
blooming face, some infirmities he had; and one particularly 
in which he too much resembled a crocodile. This lay in a 
monstrous inaptitude for turning round. The crocodile, I pre- 
sume, owes that inaptitude to the absurd length of his back; 
but in our grandpapa it arose rather from the absurd breadth 
of his back, combined, possibly, with some growing stiffness 
in his legs. Now, upon this crocodile infirmity of his I planted 
a human advantage for tendering my homage to Miss Fanny. 
In defiance of all his honourable vigilance, no sooner had he 
presented to us his mighty Jovian back (what a field for dis- 
playing to mankind his royal scarlet!), whilst inspecting pro- 
fessionally the buckles, the straps, and the silvery turrets " 
of his harness, than I raised Miss Fanny's hand to my lips, and, 
by the mixed tenderness and respectfulness of my manner. 



200 



DE QUINCEY 



caused her easily to understand how happy it would make me 
to rank upon her list as No. lo or 12, in which case a few 
casualties amongst her lovers (and observe, they hanged lib- 
erally in those days) might have promoted me speedily to the 
top of the tree ; as, on the other hand, with how much loyalty 
of submission I acquiesced by anticipation in her award, sup- 
posing that she should plant me in the very rearward of her 
favour, as No. 199+1- Most truly I loved this beautiful and 
ingenuous girl; and had it not been for the Bath mail, timing 
all courtships by post-ofhce allowance, heaven only knows 
what might have come of it. People talk of being over head 
and ears in love; now, the mail was the cause that I sank only 
over ears in love, which, you know, still left a trifle of brain 
to overlook the whole conduct of the affair. 

Ah, reader! when I look back upon those days, it seems to 
me that all things change — all things perish. " Perish the 
roses and the palms of kings;" perish even the crowns and 
trophies of Waterloo: thunder and lightning are not the 
thunder and lightning which I remember. Roses are degen- 
erating. The Fannies of our island — though this I say with 
reluctance — are not visibly improving; and the Bath road is 
notoriously superannuated. Crocodiles, you will say, are sta- 
tionary. Mr. Waterton tells me that the crocodile does not 
change; that a cayman, in fact, or an alligator, is just as good 
for riding upon as he was in the time of the Pharaohs. That 
may be ; but the reason is, that the crocodile does not live fast — 
he is a slow coach. I believe it is generally understood among 
naturalists, that the crocodile is a blockhead. It is my own 
impression that the Pharaohs were also blockheads. Now, as 
the Pharaohs and the crocodile domineered over Egyptian 
society, this accounts for a singular mistake that prevailed 
through innumerable generations on the Nile. The crocodile 
made the ridiculous blunder of supposing man to be meant 
chiefly for his own eating. Man, taking a different view of 
the subject, naturally met that mistake by another: he viewed 
the crocodile as a thing sometimes to worship, but always to 
run away from. And this continued until Mr. Waterton" 
changed the relations between -the animals. The mode of 
escaping from the reptile he showed to be, not by running 
away, but by leaping on its back, booted and spurred. The 
two animals had misunderstood each other. The use of the 
crocodile has now been cleared up — viz., to be ridden ; and 
the final cause of man is, that he may improve the health of the 
crocodile by riding him a fox-hunting before breakfast. And 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 20I 

it is pretty certain that any crocodile, who has been regularly 
hunted through the season, and is master of the weight he 
carries, will take a six-barred gate now as well as ever he would 
have done in the infancy of the pyramids. 

If, therefore, the crocodile does not change, all things else 
undeniably do: even the shadow of the pyramids grows less. 
And often the restoration in vision of Fanny and the Bath road, 
makes me too pathetically sensible of that truth. Out of the 
darkness, if I happen to call back the image of Fanny, up rises 
suddenly from a gulf of forty years a rose in June ; or, if I think 
for an instant of the rose in June, up rises the heavenly face of 
Fanny. One after the other, like the antiphonies in the choral 
service, rise Fanny and the rose in June, then back again the 
rose in June and Fanny. Then come both together, as in a 
chorus — roses and Fannies, Fannies and roses, without end, 
thick as blossoms in paradise. Then comes a venerable croco- 
dile, in a royal livery of scarlet and gold with sixteen capes; 
and the crocodile is driving four-in-hand from the box of the 
Bath mail. And suddenly we upon the mail are pulled up 
by a mighty dial sculptured with the hours, that mingle with 
the heavens and the heavenly host. Then all at once we are 
arrived at Marlborough forest, amongst the lovely households^' 
of the roe-deer; the deer and their fawns retire into the dewy 
thickets; the thickets are rich with roses; once again the roses 
call up the sweet countenance of Fanny; and she, being the 
granddaughter of a crocodile, awakens a dreadful host of semi- 
legendary animals — griffins, dragons, basilisks, sphinxes — 
till at length the whole vision of fighting images crowds into 
one towering armorial shield, a vast emblazonry of human 
charities and human loveliness that have perished, but quartered 
heraldically with unutterable and demoniac natures, whilst over 
all rises, as a surmounting crest, one fair female hand, with the 
forefinger pointing, in sweet, sorrowful admonition, upwards 
to heaven, where is sculptured the eternal writing which pro- 
claims the frailty of earth and her children. 

But the grandest chapter of our experience, within the whole 
mail-coach service, was on those occasions when we went down 
from London with the news of victory. A period of about ten 
years stretched from Trafalgar to Waterloo; the second and 
third years of which period (1806 and 1807) were comparatively 
sterile; but the other nine (from 1805 to 181 5 inclusively) fur- 
nished a long succession of victories; the least of which, in such 
a contest of Titans, had an inappreciable value of position — 
partly for its absolute interference with the plans of our enemy, 



202 DE QUINCEY 

but still more from its keeping alive through central Europe the 
sense of a deep-seated vulnerability in France. Even to tease 
the coasts of our enemy, to mortify them by continual block- 
ades, to insult them by capturing if it were but a baubling 
schooner under the eyes of their arrogant armies, repeated from 
time to time a sullen proclamation of power lodged in one 
quarter to which the hopes of Christendom turned in secret. 
How much more loudly must this proclamation have spoken in 
the audacity " of having bearded the elite of their troops, and 
having beaten them in pitched battles ! Five years of life it 
was worth paying down for the privilege of an outside place 
on a mail-coach, when carrying down the first tidings of any 
such event. And it is to be noted that, from our insular situa- 
tion, and the multitude of our frigates disposable for the rapid 
transmission of intelligence, rarely did any unauthorized rumor 
steal away a prelibation from the first aroma of the regular 
despatches. The government news was generally the earliest 
news. 

From eight p. m., to fifteen or twxnty minutes later, imagine 
the mails assembled on parade in Lombard Street, where, at 
that time," and not in St. Martin's-le-Grand, was seated the 
General Post-office. In what exact strength we mustered I do 
not remember; but, from the length of each separate attelage, 
we filled the street, though a long one, and though we were 
drawn up in double file. On any night the spectacle was beau- 
tiful. The absolute perfection of all the appointments about 
the carriages and the harness, their strength, their brilliant 
cleanliness, their beautiful simplicity — but, more than all, the 
royal magnificence of the horses — were what might first have 
fixed the attention. Every carriage, on every morning in the 
year, was taken down to an official inspector for examination 
— wheels, axles, linchpins, poles, glasses, lamps, were all critic- 
ally probed and tested. Every part of every carriage had been 
cleaned, every horse had been groomed, with as much rigor 
as if they belonged to a private gentleman ; and that part of the 
spectacle offered itself always. But the night before us is a 
night of victory ; and, behold ! to the ordinary display, what 
a heart-shaking addition ! — horses, men, carriages, all are 
dressed in laurels and flowers, oak-leaves and ribbons. The 
guards, as being officially his Majesty's servants, and of the 
coachmen such as are within the privilege of the post-office, wear 
the royal liveries of course ; and as it is summer (for all the land 
victories were naturally won in summer), they wear, on this 
fine evening, these liveries exposed to view, without any cover- 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH 203 

ing of upper coats. Such a costume, and the elaborate arrange- 
ment of the laurels in their hats, dilate their hearts, by giving 
to them opeiily a personal connection with the great news, in 
which already they have the general interest of patriotism. 
That great national sentiment surmounts and quells all sense 
of ordinary distinctions. Those passengers who happen to be 
gentlemen are now hardly to be distinguished as such except 
by dress; for the usual reserve of their manner in speaking to 
the attendants has on this night melted away. One heart, one 
pride, one glory, connects every man by the transcendent bond 
of his national blood. The spectators, who are numerous 
beyond precedent, express their sympathy with these fervent 
feelings by continual hurrahs. Every moment are shouted 
aloud by the post-office servants, and summoned to draw up, 
the great ancestral names of cities known to history through 
a thousand years — Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, Glou- 
cester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, Edin- 
burgh, Glasgow, Perth, Sterling, Aberdeen — expressing the 
grandeur of the empire by the antiquity of its towns, and the 
grandeur of the mail establishment by the diffusive radiation 
of its separate missions. Every moment you hear thunder of 
lids locked down upon the mail-bags. That sound to each 
individual mail is the signal for drawing off, which process is 
the finest part of the entire spectacle. Then come the horses 
into play. Horses ! can these be horses that bound off with the 
action and gestures of leopards? What stir! — what sea-like 
ferment ! — what a thundering of wheels ! — what a trampling 
of hoofs ! — what a sounding of trumpets ! — what farewell 
cheers — what redoubling peals of brotherly congratulation, 
connecting the name of the particular mail — " Liverpool for 
ever !" — with the name of the particular victory — " Badajoz 
for ever!" or "Salamanca for ever!" The half-slumbering 
consciousness that, all night long and all the next day — per- 
haps for even a longer period — many of these mails, like fire 
racing along a train of gunpowder, will be kindling at every 
instant new successions of burning joy, has an obscure effect of 
multiplying the victory itself, by multiplying to the imagination 
into infinity the stages of its progressive diffusion. A fiery 
arrow seems to be let loose, which from that moment is des- 
tined to travel, without intermission, westwards for three hun- 
dred " miles — northwards for six hundred ; and the sympathy 
of our Lombard Street friends at parting is exalted a hundred- 
fold by a sort of visionary sympathy with the yet slumbering 



204 DE QUINCEY 

sympathies which in so vast a succession we are going to 
awake. 

Liberated from the embarrassments of the city, and issuing 
into the broad uncrowded avenues of the northern suburbs, 
we soon begin to enter upon our natural pace of ten miles an 
hour. In the broad light of the summer evening, the sun, per- 
haps, only just at the point of setting, we are seen from every 
story of every house. Heads of every age crowd to the win- 
dows — young and old understand the language of our vic- 
torious symbols — and rolling volleys of sympathizing cheers 
run along us, behind us, and before us. The beggar, rearing 
himself against the wall, forgets his lameness — real or assumed 
— thinks not of his whining trade, but stands erect, with bold 
exulting smiles, as we pass him. The victory has healed him, 
and says, "Be thou whole !" Women and children, from garrets 
alike and cellars, through infinite London, look down or look 
up with loving eyes upon our gay ribbons and our martial 
laurels; sometimes kiss their hands; sometimes hang out, as 
signals of affection, pocket-handkerchiefs, aprons, dusters, any- 
thing that, by catching the summer breezes, will express an 
aerial jubilation. On the London side of Barnet, to which we 
draw near within a few minutes after nine, observe that private 
carriage which is approaching us. The weather being so 
warm, the glasses are all down; and one may read, as on the 
stage of a theatre, everything that goes on within. It contains 
three ladies — one likely to be " mamma," and two of seven- 
teen or eighteen, who are probably her daughters. What 
lovely animation, what beautiful unpremeditated pantomime, 
explaining to us every syllable that passes, in these ingenuous 
girls! By the sudden start and raising of the hands, on first 
discovering our laurelled equipage! — by the sudden move- 
ment and appeal to the elder lady from both of them — and by 
the heightened colour on their animated countenances, we can 
almost hear them saying, "See, see! Look at their laurels! 
Oh, mamma! there has been a great battle in Spain; and it has 
been a great victory." In a moment we are on the point of 
passing them. We passengers — I on the box, and the two 
on the roof behind me — raise our hats to the ladies ; the coach- 
man makes his professional salute with the whip; the guard 
even, though punctilious on the matter of his dignity as an 
ofiicer under the crown, touches his hat. The ladies move to 
us, in return, with a winning graciousness of gesture ; all smile 
on each side in a way that nobody could misunderstand, and 
that nothing short of a grand national sympathy could so 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 205 

instantaneously prompt. Will these ladies say that we are 
nothing to them? Oh, no; they will not say that. They can- 
not deny — they do not deny — that for this night they are 
our sisters; gentle or simple, scholar or illiterate servant, for 
twelve hours to come, we on the outside have the honour to be 
their brothers. Those poor women, again, who stop to gaze 
upon us with delight at the entrance of Barnet, and seem, by 
their air of weariness, to be returning from labour — do you 
mean to say that they are washerwomen and charwomen? Oh, 
my poor friend, you are quite mistaken. I assure you they 
stand in a far higher rank; for this one night they feel them- 
selves by birthright to be daughters of England, and answer 
to no humbler title. 

Every joy, however, even rapturous joy — such is the sad 
law of earth — may carry with it grief, or fear of grief, to some. 
Three miles beyond Barnet, we see approaching us another pri- 
vate carriage, nearly repeating the circumstances of the former 
case. Here, also, the glasses are all down — here, also, is an 
elderly lady seated ; but the two daughters are missing ; for the 
single young person sitting by the lady's side, seems to be an 
attendant — so I judge from her dress, and her air of respectful 
reserve. The lady is in mourning ,-i and her countenance 
expresses sorrow. At first' she does not look up; so that I 
believe she is not aware of our approach, until she hears the 
measured beating of our horses' hoofs. Then she raises her 
eyes to settle them painfully on our triumphal equipage. Our 
decorations explain the case to her at once; but she beholds 
them with apparent anxiety, or even with terror. Some time 
before this, I finding it difficult to hit a flying mark, when 
embarrassed by the coachman's person and reins intervening, 
had given to the guard a " Courier " evening paper, containing 
the gazette, for the next carriage that might pass. Accord- 
ingly he tossed it in, so folded that the huge capitals expressing 
some such legend as — "glorious victory", might catch the 
eye at once. To see the paper, however, at all, interpreted as it 
was by our ensigns of triumph, explained everything; and, if 
the guard were right in thinking the lady to have received it 
with a gesture of horror, it could not be doubtful that she had 
suffered some deep personal affliction in connection with this 
Spanish war. 

Here, now, was the case of one who, having formerly suf- 
fered, might, erroneously perhaps, be distressing herself with 
anticipations of another similar suffering. That same night, 
and hardly three hours later, occurred the reverse case. A 



206 DE QUINCEY 

poor woman, who too probably would find herself, in a day or 
two, to have suffered the heaviest afflictions by the battle, 
blindly allowed herself to express an exultation so unmeas- 
ured in the news and its details, as gave to her the appearance 
which amongst Celtic Highlanders is called "fey". This was at 
some little town where we changed horses an hour or two after 
midnight. Some fair or wake had kept the people up out of 
their beds, and had occasioned a partial illumination of the 
stalls and booths, presenting an unusual but very impressive 
effect. We saw many lights moving about as we drew near; 
and perhaps the most striking scene on the whole route was 
our reception at this place. The flashing of torches and the 
beautiful radiance of blue lights (technically, Bengal lights) 
upon the heads of our horses; the fine effect of such a showery 
and ghostly illumination falling upon our flowers and glittering 
laurels;" whilst all around ourselves, that formed a centre of 
light, the darkness gathered on the rear and flanks in massy 
blackness; these optical splendours, together with the prodigious 
enthusiasm of the people, composed a picture at once scenical 
and affecting, theatrical and holy. As we staid for three or 
four minutes, I alighted; and immediately from a dismantled 
stall in the street, where no doubt she had been presiding 
through the earlier part of the night, advanced eagerly a mid- 
dle-aged woman. The sight of my newspaper it was that had 
drawn her attention upon myself. The victory which we were 
carrying down to the provinces on this occasion, was the 
imperfect one of Talavera — imperfect for its results, such was 
the virtual treachery of the Spanish general, Cuesta, but not 
imperfect in its ever-memorable heroism. I told her the main 
outHne of the battle. The agitation of her enthusiasm had been 
so conspicuous v^^hen listening, and when first applying for 
information, that I could not but ask her if she had not some 
relative in the Peninsular army. Oh, yes; her only son was 
there. In what regiment? He was a trooper in the Twenty- 
third Dragoons. My heart sank within me as she made that 
answer. This sublime regiment, which an Englishman should 
never mention without raising his hat to their memory, had 
made the most memorable and effective charge recorded in 
military annals. They leaped their horses — over a trench 
where they could, into it, and with the result of death or 
mutilation when they could not. What proportion cleared the 
trench is nowhere stated. Those who did, closed up and went 
down upon the enemy with such divinity of fervour (I use the 
word divinity by design: the inspiration of God must have 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 207 

prompted this movement to those whom even then he was 
calHng to his presence), that two results followed. As regarded 
the enemy, this Twenty-third Dragoons, not, I believe, origin- 
ally three hundred and fifty strong, paralyzed a French column 
six thousand strong, then ascended the hill, and fixed the gaze 
of the whole French army. As regarded themselves, the 
Twenty-third were supposed at first to have been barely not 
annihilated; but eventually, I beheve, about one in four sur- 
vived. And this, then, was the regiment — a regiment already 
for some hours glorified and hallowed to the ear of all London, 
as lying stretched, by a large majority, upon one bloody acel- 
dama — in which the young trooper served whose mother was 
now talking in a spirit of such joyous enthusiasm. Did I tell 
her the truth? Had I the heart to break up her dreams. No. 
To-morrow, said I to myself — to-morrow, or the next day, will 
publish the worst. For one night more, wherefore should she 
not sleep in peace ? After to-morrow, the chances are too many 
that peace will forsake her pillow. This brief respite, then, let 
her owe to my gift and my forbearance. But, if I told her not of 
the bloody price that had been paid, not, therefore, was I silent 
on the contributions from her son's regiment to that day's ser- 
vice and glory. I showed her not the funeral banners under 
which the noble regiment was sleeping. I lifted not the over- 
shadowing laurels from the bloody trench in which horse and 
rider lay mangled together. But I told her how these dear 
children of England, officers and privates, had leaped their 
horses over all obstacles as gayly as hunters to the morning's 
chase. I told her how they rode their horses into the mists 
of death (saying to myself, but not saying to her), and laid 
down their young lives for thee, O mother England! as will- 
ingly — poured out their noble blood as cheerfully — as ever, 
after a long day's sport, when infants, they had rested their 
wearied heads upon their mother's knees, or had sunk to sleep 
in her arms. Strange it is, yet true, that she seemed to have 
no fears for her son's safety, even after this knowledge that 
the Twenty-third Dragoons had been memorably engaged ; but 
so much was she enraptured by the knowledge that his regi- 
ment, and therefore that he, had rendered conspicuous service in 
the dreadful conflict — a service which had actually made them, 
within the last twelve hours, the foremost topic of conversation 
in London — so absolutely was fear swallowed up in joy — 
that, in the mere simplicity of her fervent nature, the poor 
woman threw her arms round my neck, as she thought of her 
son, and gave to me the kiss which secretly was meant for him. 



208 DE QUINCEY 

Notes 

*This little paper, according to my original intention, formed part 
of the " Suspiria de Profundis," from which, for a momentary pur- 
pose, I did not scruple to detach it, and to publish it apart, as suffi- 
ciently intelligible even when dislocated from its place in a larger 
whole. To my surprise, however, one or two critics, not carelessly in 
conversation, but deliberately in print, professed their inability to 
apprehend the meaning of the whole, or to follow the links of the 
connection between its several parts. I am myself as little able to 
understand where the difficulty lies, or to detect any lurking obscurity, 
as those critics found themselves to unravel my logic. Possibly I 
may not be an indifferent and neutral judge in such a case. I will 
therefore sketch a brief abstract of the little paper according to my 
own original design, and then leave the reader to judge how far this 
design is kept in sight through the actual execution. 

Thirty-seven years ago, or rather more, accident made me, in the 
dead of night, and of a night memorably solemn, the solitary witness 
to an appalling scene, which threatened instant death, in a shape the 
most terrific, to two young people, whom I had'no means of assisting, 
except in so far as I was able to give them a most hurried warning of 
their danger; but even that not until they stood within the very shadow 
of the catastrophe, being divided from the most frightful of deaths 
by scarcely more, if more at all, than seventy seconds. 

Such was the scene, such in its outline, from which the whole of this 
paper radiates as a natural expansion. The scene is circumstantially 
narrated in Section the Second, entitled " The Vision of Sudden 
Death." 

But a movement of horror and of spontaneous recoil from this 
dreadful scene naturally carried the whole of that ^cene, raised and 
idealized into my dreams, and very soon into a rolling succession of 
dreams. The actual scene, as looked down upon from the box of the 
mail, was transformed into a dream, as tumultuous and changing as 
a musical fugue. This troubled dream is circumstantially reported in 
Section the Third, entitled, " Dream-Fugue upon the Theme of Sudden 
Death." What I had beheld from my seat upon the mail, — the scen- 
ical strife of action and passion, of anguish and fear, as I had there 
witnessed them moving in ghostly silence; this duel between life and 
death narrowing itself to a point of such exquisite evanescence as the 
collision neared, — all these elements of the scene blended, under the 
law of association, with the previous and permanent features of dis- 
tinction investing the mail itself, which features at that time lay — 
first, in velocity unprecedented; secondly, in the power and beauty of 
the horses; thirdly, in the official connection with the government of 
a great nation; and, fourthly, in the function, almost a consecrated 
function, of publishing and diffusing through the land the great politi- 
cal events, and especially the great battles during a conflict of unparal- 
leled grandeur. These honorary distinctions are all described circum- 
stantially in the first or introductory section " The Glory of Motion." 
The three first were distinctions maintained at all times; but the fourth 
and grandest belonged exclusively to the war with Napoleon; and 
this it was which most naturally introduced Waterloo into the dream, 
Waterloo, I understood, was the particular feature of the " Dream- 
Fugue " which my censors were least able to account for. Yet surely 
Waterloo, which, in common with every other great battle, it had been 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 209 

our special privilege to publish over all the land, most naturally 
entered the Dream under the license of our privilege. If not — if there 
be anything amiss — let the Dream be responsible. The Dream is a 
law to itself; and as well quarrel with a rainbow for showing, or for 
not showing, a secondary arch. So far as I know, every element in 
the shifting movements of the Dream derived itself either primarily 
from the incidents of the actual scene, or from secondary features 
associated with the mail. For example, the cathedral aisle derived 
itself from the mimic combination of features which grouped them- 
selves together at the point of approaching collision, namely, an arrow- 
like section of the road, six hundred yards long, under the solemn 
lights described, with lofty trees meeting overhead in arches. The 
guard's horn, again — a humble instrument in itself — was yet glorified 
as the organ of publication for so many great national events. And 
the incident of the dying trumpeter, who rises from a marble bas- 
relief, and carries a marble trumpet to his marble lips for the purpose 
of warning the female infant, was doubtless secretly suggested by my 
own imperfect effort to seize the guard's horn, and to blow a warning 
blast. But the Dream knows best; and the Dream, I say again, is the 
responsible party. 

^ Lady Madeline Gordon. 

' Thus, in the calendar of the Church Festivals, the discovery of 
the true cross (by Helen, the mother of Constantine) is recorded 
(and one might think — with the express consciousness of sarcasm) as 
the "Invention of the Cross." 

* One case was familiar to mail-coach travellers, where two mails 
in opposite directions, north and south, starting at the same minute 
from points six hundred miles apart, met almost constantly at a par- 
ticular bridge which bisected the total distance. 

°"De non apparentibus," etc. 
_ ^"Snobs," and its antithesis, "nobs," arose among the internal fac- 
tions of shoemakers perhaps ten years later. Possibly enough, the 
terms may have existed much earlier; but they were then first made 
known, picturesquely and effectively, by a trial at some assizes which 
happened to fix the public attention. 

^ The allusion to a well-known chapter in Von Troll's work, entitled, 
" Concerning the Snakes of Iceland." The entire chapter consists of 
these six words — " There are no snakes in Iceland." 

* The very sternest code of rules was enforced upon the mails by 
the Post-office. Throughout England, only three outsides were 
allowed, of whom one was to sit on the box, and the other two imme- 
diately behind the box; none, under any pretext, to come near the 
guard; an indispensable caution, since else, under the guise of a passen- 
ger, a robber might by any one of a thousand advantages — which 
sometimes are created, but always are favoured by the animation of 
frank, social intercourse — have disarmed the guard. Beyond the 
Scottish border, the regulation was so far relaxed as to allow of four 
outsides, but not relaxed at all as to the mode of placing them. One, 
as before, was seated on the box, and the other three on the front of 
the roof, with a determinate and ample separation from the little 
insulated chair of the guard. This relaxation was conceded by way 
of compensating to Scotland her disadvantages in point of population. 
England, by the superior density of her population, might always 
count upon a large fund of profits in the fractional trips of chance 
passengers riding for short distances of two or three stages. In 

14 



2IO DE QUINCEY 

Scotland, this chance counted for much less. And, therefore, to make 
good the deficiency, Scotland was allowed a compensatory profit upon 
one extra passenger. 

"Yes, false! for the words ascribed to Napoleon, as breathed to the 
memory of Desaix, never were uttered at all. They stand in the same 
category of theatrical fictions as the cry of the foundering line-of- 
battle ship Vengeur, as the vaunt of General Cambronne at Waterloo. 
"Le Garde menrt, mais ne se rend pas," or as the repartees of 
Talleyrand, 

"The general impression was, that the royal livery belonged of 
right to the mail-coachmen as their professional dress. But that was 
an error. To the guard it did belong, I believe, and was obviously 
essential as an official warrant, and as a means of instant identification 
for his person, in the discharge of his important public duties. But 
the coachman, and especially if his place in the series did not connect 
him immediately with London and the General Post-office, obtained 
the scarlet coat only as an honorary distinction after long (or, if not 
long, trying and special) service. 

" As one who loves and venerates Chaucer for his unrivalled merits 
of tenderness, of picturesque characterization, and of narrative skill, I 
noticed with great pleasure that the word torrettes is used by him to 
designate the little devices through which the reins are made to pass. 
This same word, in the same exact sense, I heard uniformly used by 
many scores of illustrious mail-coachmen, to whose confidential friend- 
ship I had the honour of being admitted in my younger days. 

" Had the reader lived through the last generation, he would not 
need to be told that some thirty or thirty-five years back, Mr. Water- 
ton, a distinguished country gentleman of ancient family in Northum- 
berland, publicly mounted and rode in top-boots a savage old crocodile, 
that was restive and very impertinent, but all to no purpose. The 
crocodile jibbed and tried to kick, but vainly. He was no more able 
to throw the squire, than Sinbad was to throw the old scoundrel who 
used his back without paying for it, until he discovered a mode 
(slightly immoral, perhaps, though some think not) of murdering the 
old fraudulent jockey, and so circuitously of unhorsing him. 

" Roe-deer do not congregate in herds like the fallow or the red 
deer, but by separate families, parents and children; which feature of 
approximation to the sanctity of human hearths, added to their com- 
paratively miniature and graceful proportions, conciliate to them an 
interest of peculiar tenderness, supposing even that this beautiful 
creature is less characteristically impressed with the grandeurs of 
savage and forest life. 

"Such the French accounted it; and it has struck me that Soult 
would not have been so popular in London at the period of her present 
Majesty's coronation, or in Manchester, on occasion of his visit to 
that town, if they had been aware of the insolence with which he spoke 
of us in notes written at intervals from the field of Waterloo. As 
though it had been mere felony in our army to look a French one in 
the face, he said in more notes than one, dated from two to four p." m., 
on the field of Waterloo, " Here are the English — we have them; they 
are caught en flagrant delit." Yet no man should have known us 
better; no man had drunk deeper from the cup of humiliation than 
Soult had in 1809, when ejected by us with headlong violence from 
Oporto, and pursued through a long line of wrecks to the frontier 
of Spain; subsequently at Albuera, in the bloodiest of recorded 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 2 1 1 

battles, to say nothing of Toulouse, he should have learned our 

pretensions. . irr ^ ^ 

" I soeak of the era previous to Waterloo. . 

"O^necessity, this scale of measurement to an American if he 
haooens to be a thoughtless man, must sound ludicrous Accordingly, 
I remember a case in which an American writer indulges himself in 
theXxury of a little fibbing, by ascribing to an Englishman a pomp- 
ous acco/nt of the Thames, constructed entirely upon American ideas 
orgrandeur, and concluding in something like these terms:- And sir 
arriing at London, this mighty father of rivers attains a breadth of 
arieas! two furlongs, having, in its winding course traversed the 
astoShing distance of one hundred and seventy miles." And this he 
candid American thinks it fair to contrast with the scale of he 
Mississippi Now, it is hardly worth while to answer a pure fiction 
frave y el^e one might say that no Englishman out of Bedlam ever 
though of looking in an island for the rivers of a contment; nor, con- 
sequfntly could hive thought of looking for the peculiar grandeur of 
the Thames in the length of its course or m the extent of soil which 
f drains yet ^f he had been so absurd, the American might have recol- 
ected thafa ver, not to be compared with, the Thames even as to 
volume of water- viz., the Tiber - has contrived to make itself heard 
o? in thb world for twenty-five centuries to an extent not reached as 
yet by any Hver, however corpulent, of his own land. The glory of the 
Thar^es is measured by the destiny of the population to which it min- 
isters by the commerce which it supports, by. the grandeur of the 
eSe in which, though far from the largest, it is the most influential 
stream Upon some such scale, and not by a transfer of Columbian 
standards is the course of out English mails to be valued. The 
American may fancy the effect of his own valuations to. our English 
ea?s by si^posing the case of a Siberian glorifying his country in 
thes'e terms - " These wretches, sir, in France and England, cannot 
mS?h haTf a mile in any direction without finding a house Avhere food 
Sn be had a^ lodging; whereas, such is the noble desolation of our 
magnificent country that in many a direction for a thousand miles, I 
wilf engage that a dog shall not find shelter from a snow-storm, nor a 

"^'S^l itt^ obTr^^ha^ the^^'o^r- of green suffers almost a spiritual 
change and exaltation under the effect of Bengal lights. 



II 



THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH 

WHAT is to be taken as the predominant opinion of 
man, reflective and philosophic, upon sudden death? 
It is remarkable that, in different conditions of soci- 
ety, sudden death has been variously regarded as the 
consummation of an earthly career most fervently to be 
desired, or, again, as that consummation which is with 
most horror to be deprecated. Caesar the Dictator, at 
his last dinner party (coena), on the very evening before 
his assassination, when the minutes of his earthly career 
were numbered, being asked what death, in his judgment, 
might be pronounced the most eligible, replied, " That which 
should be most sudden." On the other hand, the divine Litany 
of our English Church, when breathing forth supplications, as 
if in some representative character for the whole human race 
prostrate before God, places such a death in the very van of 
horrors: — "From Hghtning and tempest; from plague, pesti- 
lence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden 
death — Good Lord, deliver us." Sudden death is here made 
to crown the climax in a grand ascent of calamities ; it is ranked 
among the last of curses; and yet, by the noblest of Romans, 
it was ranked as the first of blessings. In that difference, most 
readers will see little more than the essential difference between 
Christianity and Paganism. But this, on consideration, I 
doubt. The Christian Church may be right in its estimate of 
sudden death ; and it is a natural feeling, though after all it may 
also be an infirm one, to wish for a quiet dismissal from life — 
as that which seems most reconcilable with meditation, with 
penitential retrospects, and with the humilities of farewell 
prayer. There does not, however, occur to me any direct 
scriptural warrant for this earnest petition of the English 
Litany, unless under a special construction of the word " sud- 
den." It seems a petition — indulged rather and conceded to 
human infirmity, than exacted from human piety. It is not so 
much a doctrine built upon the eternities of the Christian sys- 
tem, as a plausible opinion built upon special varieties of physi- 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH 213 

cal temperament. Let that, however, be as it may, two remarks 
su-?est themselves as prudent restraints upon a doc rine, which 
else may wander, and has wandered, into an uncharitable super- 
st tio^ The first is this: that many people are likely to exag- 
ge ate the horror of a sudden death, from the disposition to 
fay a false stress upon words or acts, simply ^^^f^'^^^^ 
accident they have become final words or acts. If a man dies 
for instance! by some sudden death when he happens to be 
n ox" ated, such a death is falsely regarded with peculiar 
horror- as though the intoxication were suddenly exalted into 
a blasphemy. But that is unphilosophic. The man was, or he 
wa nSTabitually a drunkard. If not, if his intoxication were 
r solitary accident, there can be no reason for allowing spec.a 
emphasis to this act, simply because through misfortune ,t 
became his final act. Nor, on the other hand, if i were no 
acddent, but one of his habitual transgressions, will it be the 
more habitual or the more.a transgression, because some sud- 
den calamity surprising him, has caused this habitual trans 
eresstonto be also a final one. Could the man have had any 
feLon even dimly to foresee his own sudden death there woud 
have been a new feature in his act of intemperance — eature 
of presumption and irreverence, as in °n%that, having known 
himself drawing near to the presence of God ^houU h^ve 
suited his demeanour to an expectation so awful. But this is 
no oart o the case supposed. And the only new elenient m the 
man's act is not any element of special immorality, but simply 

"^TrotS'femaThas reference to the meaning of the word 
sudden Very possibly Cssar and the Christian Church do 
not dTf^er in the way supposed; that is, do not d.fifer by any 
difference of doctrine as between Pagan and Christian views of 
the moral temper appropriate to death, but perhaps they are 
contemplating different cases. Both contemplate a violent 
death a /?<«('--"? -death that is B,a<o,, or, in other words, 
d ath that is brought about, not by internal and spontaneous 
change, but by active force having its ongi" from without 
In this meaning the two authorities agree. Thus far they are 
"harmony. But the difference is, that the Roman by h 
word "sudden" means unhngering; whereas the Christian 
Utany by "sudden death" means a death without warning 
consequently without any available summons to rehgu^us 
oreoaration. The poor mutineer, who kneels down to gather 
Fnto'hTs heart the b'ullets f-m twelve firelocks of his Pitying 
comrades, dies by a most sudden death in Caesars sense, one 



214 ^^ QUINCEY 

shock, one mighty spasm, one (possibly not one) groan, and 
all is over. But in the sense of the Litany, the mutineer's 
death is far from sudden; his ofitence originally, his imprison- 
ment, his trial, the interval between his sentence and its execu- 
tion, having all furnished him with separate warnings of his 
fate — having all summoned him to meet it with solemn 
preparation. 

Here at once, in this sharp verbal distinction, we compre- 
hend the faithful earnestness with which a holy Christian 
Church pleads on behalf of her poor departing children, that 
God would vouchsafe to them the last great privilege and dis- 
tinction possible on a death-bed — viz., the opportunity of 
untroubled preparation for facing this mighty trial. Sudden 
death, as a mere variety in the modes of dying, where death in 
some shape is inevitable, proposes a question of choice which, 
equally in the Roman and the Christian sense, will be variously 
answered according to each man's variety of temperament. 
Meantime, one aspect of sudden death there is, one modifica- 
tion, upon which no doubt can arise, that of all martyrdoms it 
is the most agitating — viz., where it surprises a man under 
circumstances which offer (or which seem to offer) some hurry- 
ing, flying, inappreciably minute chance of evading it. Sud- 
den as the danger which it affronts must be any effort by which 
such an evasion can be accomplished. Even that, even the 
sickening necessity for hurrying in extremity where all hurry 
seems destined to be vain, even that anguish is liable to a hide- 
ous exasperation in one particular case — viz., where the appeal 
is made not exclusively to the instinct of self-preservation, but 
to the conscience, on behalf of some other life besides your 
own, accidentally thrown upon your protection. To fail, to 
collapse in a service merely your own, might seem compara- 
tively venial; though, in fact, it is far from venial. But to fail 
in a case where Providence has suddenly thrown into your 
hands the final interests of another — a fellow-creature shud- 
dering between the gates of life and death; this, to a man of 
apprehensive conscience, would mingle the misery of an atro- 
cious criminality with the misery of a bloody calamity. You 
are called upon, by the case supposed, possibly to die; but to 
die at the very moment when, by any even partial failure, or 
effeminate collapse of your energies, you will be self-denounced 
as a murderer. You had but the twinkling of an eye for your 
effort, and that effort might have been unavailing; but to have 
risen to the level of such an effort, would have rescued you, 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 2 1 5 

though not from dying, yet from dying as a traitor to your 
final and farewell duty. 

The situation here contemplated exposes a dreadful ulcer, 
lurking far down in the depths of human nature. It is not that 
men generally are summoned to face such awful trials. But 
potentially, and in shadowy outline, such a trial is moving sub- 
terraneously in perhaps all men's natures. Upon the secret 
mirror of our dreams such a trial is darkly projected, perhaps, 
to every one of us. That dream, so familiar to childhood, of 
meeting a lion, and, through languishing prostration in hope 
and the energies of hope, that constant sequel of lying down 
before the lion, publishes the secret frailty of human nature — 
reveals its deep-seated falsehood to itself — records its abysmal 
treachery. Perhaps not one of us escapes that dream; per- 
haps, as by some sorrowful doom of man, that dream repeats 
for every one of us, through every generation, the original 
temptation in Eden. Every one of us, in this dream, has a 
bait offered to the infirm places of his own individual will; once 
again a snare is presented for tempting him into captivity to a 
luxury of ruin; once again, as in aboriginal Paradise, the man 
falls by his own choice; again, by infinite iteration, the ancient 
Earth groans to Heaven, through her secret caves, over the 
weakness of her child : '* Nature, from her seat, sighing through 
all her works," again "gives signs of woe that all is lost ;" and 
again the counter sigh is repeated to the sorrowing heavens for 
the endless rebellion against God. It is not without probability 
that in the world of dreams every one of us ratifies for himself 
the original transgression. In dreams, perhaps under some 
secret conflict of the midnight sleeper, lighted up to the con- 
sciousness at the time, but darkened to the memory as soon as 
all is finished, each several child of our mysterious race com- 
pletes for himself the treason of the aboriginal fall. 

The incident, so memorable in itself by its features of horror, 
and so scenical by its groupings for the eye, which furnished 
the text for this reverie upon sudden death, occurred to myself 
in the dead of night, as a solitary spectator, when seated on the 
box of the Manchester and Glasgow mail, in the second or third 
summer after Waterloo. I find it necessary to relate the cir- 
cumstances, because they are such as could not have occurred 
unless under a singular combination of accidents. In those 
days, the oblique and lateral communications with many rural 
post-offices were so arranged, either through necessity or 
through defect of system, as to make it requisite for the main 



2l6 DE QUINCEY 

northwestern mail (i. e., the down mail), on reaching Manches- 
ter to halt for a number of hours; how many, I do not remember; 
six or seven, I think; but the result was, that, in the ordinary 
course, the mail recommenced its journey northwards about 
midnight. Wearied with the long detention at a gloomy hotel, 
I walked out about eleven o'clock at night for the sake of fresh 
air ; meaning to fall in with the mail and resume my seat at the 
post-office. The night, however, being yet dark, as the moon 
had scarcely risen, and the streets being at that hour empty, 
so as to offer no opportunities for asking the road, I lost my 
way; and did not reach the post-office until it was considerably 
past midnight; but, to my great relief (as it was important for 
me to be in Westmoreland by the morning), I saw in the huge 
saucer eyes of the mail, blazing through the gloom, an evidence 
that my chance was not yet lost. Past the time it was, but, by 
some rare accident, the mail was not even yet ready to start. 
I ascended to my seat on the box, where my cloak was still 
lying it had been lain at the Bridgewater Arms. I had left it 
there in imitation of a nautical discoverer, who leaves a bit of 
bunting on the shore of his discovery, by way of warning off 
the ground the whole human race, and notifying to the Chris- 
tian and the heathen worlds, with his best compliments, that he 
has hoisted his pocket-handkerchief once and for ever upon 
that virgin soil; thenceforward claiming the jus dominii to the 
top of the atmosphere above it, and also the right of driving 
shafts to the centre of the earth below it; so that all people 
found after this warning, either aloft in upper chambers of the 
atmosphere, or groping in subterraneous shafts, or squatting 
audaciously on the surface of the soil, will be treated as tres- 
passers — kicked, that is to say, or decapitated, as circum- 
stances may suggest, by their very faithful servant, the owner of 
the said pocket-handkerchief. In the present case, it is prob- 
able that my cloak might not have been respected, and the jus 
gentium might have been cruelly violated in my person — for, 
in the dark, people commit deeds of darkness, gas being a great 
ally of morality — but it so happened that, on this night, there 
was no other outside passenger ; and thus the crime, which else 
was but too probable, missed fire for want of a criminal. 

Having mounted the box, I took a small quantity of laud- 
anum, having already travelled two hundred and fifty miles — 
viz., from a point seventy miles beyond London. In the 
taking laudanum there was nothing extraordinary. But by 
accident it drew upon me the special attention of my assessor on 
the box, the coachman. And in that also there was nothing 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 2 I 7 

extraordinary. But by accident, and with great delight, 
it drew my own attention to the fact that this coachman was a 
monster in point of bulk, and that he had but one eye. In fact, 
he had been foretold by Virgil as 

" Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens cui lumen ademptum." 

He answered to the conditions in every one of the items : — 
I, a monster he was ; 2, dreadful ; 3, shapeless ; 4, huge ; 5, who 
had lost an eye. But why should that delight me? Had he 
been one of the Calendars in the " Arabian Nights/'' and had 
paid down his eye as the price of his criminal curiosity, what 
right had I to exult in his misfortune? I did not exult: I 
delighted in no man's punishment, though it were even merited. 
But these personal distinctions (Nos. i, 2, 3, 4, 5) identified in 
an instant an old friend of mine, whom I had known in the 
south for some years as the most masterly of mail-coachmen. 
He was the man in all Europe that could (if any could) have 
driven six-in-hand full gallop over Al Sirat — that dreadful 
bridge of Mahomet, with no side battlements, and of extra 
room not enough for a razor's edge — leading right across the 
bottomless gulf. Under this eminent man, whom in Greek I 
cognominated " Cyclops diphrelates " (Cyclops the charioteer), 
I, and others known to me, studied the diphrelatic art. Excuse, 
reader, a word too elegant to be pedantic. As a pupil, though 
I paid extra fees, it is to be lamented that I did not stand high 
in his esteem. It showed his dogged honesty (though, observe, 
not his discernment), that he could not see my merits. Let us 
excuse his absurdity in this particular, by remembering his 
want of an eye. Doubtless that made him blind to my merits. 
In the art of conversation, however, he admitted that I had the 
whip-hand of him. On this present occasion, great joy was at 
our meeting. But what was Cyclops doing here? Had the 
medical men recommended northern air, or how? I collected, 
from such explanations as he volunteered, that he had an inter- 
est at stake in some suit-at-law now pending at Lancaster; so 
that probably he had got himself transferred to this station, for 
the purpose of connecting with his professional pursuits an 
instant readiness for the calls of his lawsuit. 

Meantime, what are we stopping for? Surely we have now 
waited long enough. Oh, this procrastinating mail, and this 
procrastinating post-ofifice! Can't they take a lesson upon 
that subject from me? Some people have called me procras- 
tinating. Yet you are witness, reader, that I was kept here 
waiting for the post-ofilice. Will the post-ofifice lay its hand on 



2l8 DE QUINCEY 

its heart, in its moments of sobriety, and assert that ever it 
waited for me? What are they about? The guard tells me 
that there is a large extra accumulation of foreign mails this 
night, owing to irregularities caused by war, by wind, by 
weather, in the packet service, which as yet does not benefit at 
all by steam. For an extra hour, it seems, the post-ofhce has 
been engaged in threshing out the pure wheaten correspond- 
ence of Glasgow, and winnowing it from the chaff of all baser 
intermediate towns. But at last all is finished. Sound your 
horn, guard. Manchester, good-by; we've lost an hour by 
your criminal conduct at the post-office: which, however, 
though I do not mean to part with a serviceable ground of 
complaint, and one which really is such for the horses, to me 
secretly is an advantage, since it compels us to look sharply 
for this lost hour amongst the next eight or nine, and to 
recover it (if we can) at the rate of one mile extra per hour. 
Off we are at last, and at eleven miles per hour: and for the 
moment I detect no changes in the energy or in the skill of 
Cyclops. 

From Manchester to Kendal, which virtually (though not in 
law) is the capital of Westmoreland, there were at this time 
seven stages of eleven miles each. The first five of these, count- 
ing from Manchester, terminate in Lancaster, which is there- 
fore fifty-five miles north of Manchester, and the same distance 
exactly from Liverpool. The first three stages terminate in 
Preston (called, by way of distinction from other towns of that 
name, " proud Preston "), at which place it is that the separate 
roads from Liverpool and from Manchester to the north 
become confluent.^ Within these first three stages lay the 
foundation, the progress, and termination of our night's adven- 
ture. During the first stage, I found out that Cyclops was 
mortal: he was liable to the shocking affection of sleep — a 
thing which previously I had never suspected. If a man 
indulges in the vicious habit of sleeping, all the skill in auriga- 
tion of Apollo himself, with the horses of Aurora to execute his 
notions, avail him nothing. " Oh, Cyclops ! " I exclaimed, 
" thou art mortal. My friend, thou snorest." Through the 
first eleven miles, however, this infirmity — which I grieve to 
say that he shared with the whole Pagan Pantheon — betrayed 
itself only by brief snatches. On waking up, he made an 
apology for himself, which, instead of mending matters, laid 
open a gloomy vista of coming disasters. Tlie summer assizes, 
he reminded me, were now going on at Lancaster: in conse- 
quence of which, for three nights and three days, he had not 



\ 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 219 

, • J •„ , hpH Durine the day.he was waiting for his own 
lamdownmabed. Dunngthe y, ^^.^^ ^^ ^^^ interested: 

summons as a witness on uie um ^itical moment, was 

or else, lest he should be niissmg ^f *e cra.cm ^ 

drinking with the other ^.tn^ses^^ under the pas^t^^ ^^ .^ 

which mad. it much »?" '.'""T/ ' S°h" ""ic.dily l!™8 

him; and to -'^^'"''''^^'',.%^te> iol p^rh^ps thirty times, 
singing 'Love ^'"""l^'.'^^^f °'piau e had in revenge mood- 
without invitation and without aPP'a"se ^ ^^jj^, ^s the 

Tafthi^nVrnmn/at the least twelve^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^ ^^^^ 

What made this negligence '"f, """'", .,lroads at night 
have been thought. -^ the «nd. tion o« the^ -^s ^^ ^^g^_ 

during the assizes. At that t™^' ^ ' ", .^„^^.„t„i. ^ith its vast 
lous Liverpool, and also of W w"vfas call d up by ancient 
cincture of populous rura districts was ca„ed y^^^^ 

usage to the tribunal of Li"iP.uti^n/-^ncaste ^^g^ful 

this^old traditiona ^^f^J^l'^^l^^ ^Z arrangements; 
established interests; \lll'%^l^^^\°^t as yet this change 
and 3- a new Pari'a««="tf ^ ^^^^ "f. ^ut y ^^^^^^^ 

was merely in jontemplat.on of business rdled northwards, 
twice in the year' so vast a body of business ro ^^^^ 

from the southern quarter of t*l^^°""'y'o*ftU judges in its 
at least it occupied the severe exert ons^ of two 1 g ^^^^^ 
despatch. The consequence of this J^s tnat y ^^^ 

av^Jlable for such a «^f >«' ^""^X^^des o' p"°P'<= ^^^^ ^"'" 
exhausted in carrying down *%™" ^u^es ot pe p ^ 

parties to the different suits By une^^thei^e, ^^^ ^^^ 

Lttrrctit:'r:u'chnr^^^^^^ - -^ -- 

uproar was ever witnessed in England. 



2 20 DE QUINCEY 

On this occasion, the usual silence and solitude prevailed 
along the road. Not a hoof nor a wheel was to be heard. And 
to strengthen this false luxurious confidence in the noiseless 
roads, it happened also that the night was one of peculiar 
solemnity and peace. For my own part, though slightly alive 
to the possibilities of peril, I had so far yielded to the influence 
of the mighty calm as to sink into a profound reverie. The 
month was August, in the middle of which lay my own birth- 
day — a festival to every thoughtful man suggesting solemn 
and often sigh-born ^ thoughts. The county was my own 
native county — upon which, in its southern section, more than 
upon any equal area known to man past or present, had 
descended the original curse of labour in its heaviest form, not 
mastering the bodies only of men as of slaves, or criminals in 
mines, but working through the fiery will. Upon no equal 
space of earth was, or ever had been, the same energy of human 
power put forth daily. At this particular season also of the 
assizes, that dreadful hurricane of flight and pursuit, as it might 
have seemed to a stranger, which swept to and from Lancaster 
all day long, hunting the county up and down, and regularly 
subsiding back into silence about sunset, could not fail (when 
united with this permanent distinction of Lancashire as the 
very metropolis and citadel of labour) to point the thoughts 
pathetically upon that counter vision of rest, of saintly repose 
from strife and sorrow, towards which, as to their secret haven, 
the profounder aspirations of man's heart are in solitude con- 
tinually travelling. Obliquely upon our left we were nearing 
the sea, which also must, under the present circumstances, be 
repeating the general state of halcyon repose. The sea, the 
atmosphere, the light, bore each an orchestral part in this uni- 
versal lull. Moonlight, and the first timid tremblings of the 
dawn, were by this time blending; and the blendings were 
brought into a still more exquisite state of unity by a slight 
silvery mist, motionless and dreamy, that covered the woods 
and fields, but with a veil of equable transparency. Except the 
feet of our own horses, which, running on a sandy margin of 
the road, made but little disturbance, there was no sound 
abroad. In the clouds, and on the earth, prevailed the same 
majestic peace; and in spite of all that the villain of a school- 
master has done for the ruin of our sublimer thoughts, which 
are the thoughts of our infancy, we still believe in no such 
nonsense as a limited atmosphere. Whatever we may swear 
with our false feigning lips, in our faithful hearts we still 
believe, and must for ever believe, in fields of air traversing the 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 221 

total gulf between earth and the central heavens. Still in the 
confidence of children that tread without fear every chamber 
in their father's house, and to whom no door is closed, we, in 
that Sabbatic vision which sometimes is revealed for an hour 
upon nights like this, ascend with easy steps from the sorrow- 
stricken fields of earth, upwards to the sandals of God. 

Suddenly, from thoughts like these, I was awakened to a 
sullen sound, as of some motion on the distant road. It stole 
upon the air for a moment; I listened in awe; but then it died 
away. Once roused, however, I could not but observe with 
alarm the quickened motion of our horses. Ten years' experi- 
ence had made my eye learned in the valuing of motion ; and I 
saw that we were now running thirteen miles an hour. I pre- 
tend to no presence of mind. On the contrary, my fear is, that 
I am miserably and shamefully deficient in that quality as 
regards action. The palsy of doubt and distraction hangs like 
some guilty weight of dark unfathomed remembrances upon 
my energies, when the signal is flying for action. But, on the 
other hand, this accursed gift I have, as regards thought, that 
in the first step towards the possibility of a misfortune, I see 
its total evolution; in the radix of the series I see too certainly 
and too instantly its entire expansion; in the first syllable of the 
dreadful sentence, I read 'already the last. It was not that I 
feared for ourselves. Us, our bulk and impetus charmed 
against peril in any collision. And I had ridden through too 
many hundreds of perils that were frightful to approach, that 
were matter of laughter to look back upon, the first face of 
which was horror — the parting face a jest, for any anxiety to 
rest upon our interests. The mail was not built, I felt assured, 
nor bespoke, that could betray me who trusted to its protection. 
But any carriage that we could meet would be frail and light 
in comparison of ourselves. And I remark this ominous acci- 
dent of our situation. We were on the wrong side of the road. 
But then, it may be said, the other party, if other there was, 
might also be on the wrong side; and two wrongs might make 
a right. That was not likely. Tlie same motive which had 
drawn us to the right-hand side of the road — viz., the luxury 
of the soft beaten sand, as contrasted with the paved centre — 
would prove attractive to others. The two adverse carriages 
would therefore, to a certainty, be travelling on the same side; 
and from this side, as not being ours in law, the crossing over 
to the other would, of course, be looked for from us.* Our 
lamps, still lighted, would give the impression of vigilance on 
our part. And every creature that met us, would rely upon us 



222 DE QUINCEY 

for quartering." All this, and if the separate links of the antici- 
pation had been a thousand times more, I saw, not discursively, 
or by effort, or by succession, but by one flash of horrid simul- 
taneous intuition. 

Under this steady though rapid anticipation of the evil 
which might be gathering ahead, ah! what a sullen mystery of 
fear, what a sigh of woe, was that which stole upon the air, as 
again the far-off sound of a wheel was heard? A whisper it 
was — a whisper from, perhaps, four miles off — secretly 
announcing a ruin that, being foreseen, was not the less inevi- 
table; that, being known, was not, therefore, healed. What 
could be done — who was it that could do it — to check the 
storm-flight of these maniacal horses? Could I not seize 
the reins from the grasp of the slumbering coachman? 
You, reader, think that it would have been in your power to 
do so. And I quarrel not with your estimate of yourself. But, 
from the way in which the coachman's hand was viced between 
his upper and lower thigh, this was impossible. Easy, was it? 
See, then, that bronze equestrian statue. The cruel rider has 
kept the bit in his horse's mouth for two centuries. Unbridle 
him, for a minute, if you please, and wash his mouth with 
water. Easy, was it? Unhorse me, then, that imperial rider; 
knock me those marble feet from those marble stirrups of 
Charlemagne. 

The sounds ahead strengthened, and were now too clearly 
the sounds of wheels. Who and what could it be? Was it 
industry in a taxed cart? Was it youthful gayety in a gig? 
Was it sorrow that loitered, or joy that raced? For as yet the 
snatches of sound were too intermitting, from distance, to 
decipher the character of the motion. Whoever were the trav- 
ellers, something must be done to warn them. Upon the 
other party rests the active responsibility, but upon us — and, 
woe is me! that us was reduced to my frail opium-shattered 
self — rests the responsibility of warning. Yet how should 
this be accomplished? Might I not sound the guard's 
horn? Already, on the first thought, 1 was making my way 
over the roof to the guard's seat. But this, from the accident 
which I have mentioned, of the foreign mails' being piled upon 
the roof, was a difficult and even dangerous attempt to one 
cramped by nearly three hundred miles of outside travelling. 
And, fortunately, before I had lost much time in the attempt, 
our frantic horses swept round an angle of the road, which 
opened upon us that final stage where the collision must be 
accomplished, and the catastrophe sealed. All was apparently 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 223 

finished. The court was sitting; the case was heard; the judge 
had finished ; and the only verdict was yet in arrear. 

Before us lay an avenue, straight as an arrow, six hundred 
yards, perhaps, in length; and the umbrageous trees, which 
rose in a regular line from either side, meeting high overhead, 
gave to it the character of a cathedral aisle. These trees lent a 
deeper solemnity to the early light; but there was still light 
enough to perceive, at the further end of this Gothic aisle, a 
frail reedy gig, in which were seated a young man, and by his 
side, a young lady. Ah, young sir! what are you about? If 
it is requisite that you should whisper your communications 
to this young lady — though really I see nobody, at an hour 
and on a road so solitary, likely to overhear you — is it there- 
fore requisite that you should carry your Hps forward to hers? 
The little carriage is creeping on at one mile an hour; and the 
parties within it being thus tenderly engaged, are naturally 
bending down their heads. Between them and eternity, to all 
human calculation, there is but a minute and a-half. Oh 
heavens! what is it that I shall do? Speaking or acting, what 
help can I offer? Strange it is, and to a mere auditor of the 
tale might seem laughable, that I should need a suggestion 
from the " Iliad " to prompt the sole resource that remained. 
Yet so it was. Suddenly. I remembered the shout of Achilles, 
and its effect. But could I pretend to shout like the son of 
Peleus, aided by Pallas ? No : but then I needed not the shout 
that should alarm all Asia militant; such a shout would suffice 
as might carry terror into the hearts of two thoughtless young 
people, and one gig horse. I shouted — and the young man 
heard me not. A second time I shouted — and now he heard 
me, for now he raised his head. 

Here, then, all had been done that, by me, could be done: 
more on my part was not possible. Mine had been the first 
step ; the second was for the young man ; the third was for God. 
If, said I, this stranger is a brave man, and if, indeed, he loves 
the young girl at his side — or, loving her not, if he feels the 
obligation, pressing upon every man worthy to be called a 
man, of doing his utmost for a woman confided to his protec- 
tion — he will, at least, make some effort to save her. If that 
fails, he will not perish the more, or by a death more cruel, for 
having made it ; and he will die as a brave man should, with 
his face to the danger, and with his arm about the woman that 
he sought in vain to save. But, if he makes no effort, shrink- 
ing, without a struggle, from his duty, he himself will not the 
less certainly perish for this baseness of poltroonery. He will 



224 ^^ QUINCEY 

die no less: and why not? Wherefore should we grieve that 
there is one craven less in the world? No; let him perish with- 
out a pitying thought of ours wasted upon him; and, in that 
case, all our grief will be reserved for the fate of the helpless 
girl who now, upon the least shadow of failure in him, must, 
by the fiercest of translations — must, without time for a 
prayer — must, within seventy seconds, stand before the judg- 
ment-seat of God. 

But craven he was not: sudden had been the call upon him, 
and sudden was his answer to the call. He saw, he heard, he 
comprehended, the ruin that was coming down: already its 
gloomy shadow darkened above him; and already he was 
measuring his strength to deal with it. Ah! what a vulgar 
thing does courage seem, when we see nations buying it and 
selling it for a shilling a-day: ah! what a sublime thing does 
courage seem, when some fearful summons on the great deeps 
of life carries a man, as if running before a hurricane, up to the 
giddy crest of some tumultuous crisis, from v/hich lie two 
courses, and a voice says to him audibly, " One way lies hope; 
take the other, and mourn for ever! " How grand a triumph, 
if, even then, amidst the raving of all around him, and the 
frenzy of the danger, the man is able to confront his situation — 
is able to retire for a moment into solitude with God, and to 
seek his counsel from him! 

For seven seconds, it might be, of his seventy, the stranger 
settled his countenance steadfastly upon us, as if to search and 
value every element in the conflict before him. For five sec- 
onds more of his seventy he sat immovably, like one that mused 
on some great purpose. For five more, perhaps, he sat with 
eyes upraised, like one that prayed in sorrow, under some 
extremity of doubt for light that should guide him to the better 
choice. Then suddenly he rose; stood upright; and by a pow- 
erful strain upon the reins, raising his horse's fore-feet from the 
ground, he slewed him round on the pivot of his hind-legs, so 
as to plant the little equipage in a position nearly at right angles 
to ours. Thus far his condition was not improved, except as 
a first step had been taken towards the possibility of a second. 
If no more were done, nothing was done; for the little carriage 
still occupied the very centre of our path, though in an altered 
direction. Yet even now it may not be too late: fifteen of the 
seventy seconds may still be unexhausted; and one almighty 
bound may avail to clear the ground. Hurry, then, hurry! for 
the flying moments — they hurry ! Oh, hurry, hurry, my 
brave young man ! for the cruel hoofs of our horses — they also 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 225 

hurry ! Fast are the flying moments, faster are the hoofs of our 
horses. But fear not for him, if human energy can suffice; 
faithful was he that drove to his terrific duty; faithful was the 
horse to his command. One blow, one impulse given with 
voice and hand, by the stranger, one rush from the horse, one 
bound, as if in the act of rising to a fence, landed the docile 
creature's fore-feet upon the crown or arching centre of the 
road. The larger half of the little equipage had then cleared 
our overtowering shadow: that was evident even to my own 
agitated sight. But it mattered little that one wreck should 
float off in safety, if upon the wreck that perished were 
embarked the human freightage. The rear part of the car- 
riage — was that certainly beyond the line of absolute ruin? 
What power could answer the question? Glance of eye, 
thought of man, wing of angel, which of these had speed 
enough to sweep between the question and the answer, and 
divide the one from the other? Light does not tread upon the 
steps of light more indivisibly, than did our all-conquering 
arrival upon the escaping efiforts of the gig. Tliat must the 
young man have felt too plainly. His back was now turned 
to us; not by sight could he any longer communicate with the 
peril; but by the dreadful rattle of our harness, too truly had 
his ear been instructed — that all was finished as regarded any 
further eflfort of him. Already in resignation he had rested 
from his struggle; and perhaps in his heart he was whispering, 
*' Father, which art in heaven, do thou finish above what I on 
earth have attempted." Faster than ever mill-race we ran past 
them in our inexorable flight. Oh, raving of hurricanes that 
must have sounded in their young ears at the moment of our 
transit! Even in that moment the thunder of collision spoke 
aloud. Either with the swingle-bar, or with the haunch of 
our near leader, we had struck the off-wheel of the little gig, 
which stood rather obliquely, and not quite so far advanced, as 
to be accurately parallel with the near-wheel. The blow, from 
the fury of our passage, resounded terrifically. I rose in hor- 
ror, to gaze upon the ruins we might have caused. From my 
elevated station I looked down, and looked back upon the 
scene, which in a moment told its own tale, and wrote all its 
records on my heart for ever. 

Here was the map of the passion that now had finished. The 
horse was planted immovably, with his fore-feet upon the 
paved crest of the central road. He of the whole party might 
be supposed untouched by the passion of death. The little 
cany carriage — partly, perhaps, from the violent torsion of 

15 



226 DE QUINCEY 

the wheels in its recent movement, partly from the thundering 
blow we had given to it — as if it sympathized with human 
horror, was all alive with tremblings and shiverings. The 
young man trembled not, nor shivered. He sat like a rock. 
But his was the steadiness of agitation frozen into rest by hor- 
.ror. As yet he dared not to look round; for he knew that, if 
any thing remained to do, by him it could no longer be done. 
And as yet he knew not for certain if their safety were accom- 
plished. But the lady 

But the lady ! Oh, heavens! will that spectacle ever 

depart from my dreams, as she rose and sank upon her seat, 
sank and rose, threw up her arms wildly to heaven, clutched at 
some visionary object in the air fainting, praying, raving, 
despairing? Figure to yourself, reader, the elements of the 
case; suffer me to recall before your mind the circumstances of 
that unparalleled situation. From the silence and deep peace 
of this saintly summer night — from the pathetic blending of 
this sweet moonlight, dawnlight, dreamlight — from the manly 
tenderness of this flattering, whispering, murmuring love — 
suddenly as from the woods and fields — suddenly as from the 
chambers of the air opening in revelation — suddenly as from 
the ground yawning at her feet leaped upon her, with the flash- 
ing of cataracts. Death the crowned phantom, with all the 
equipage of his terrors, and the tiger roar of his voice. 

The moments were numbered; the strife v/as finished; the 
vision was closed. In the twinkling of an eye, our flying 
horses had carried us to the termination of the umbrageous 
aisle ; at right angles we wheeled into our former direction ; the 
turn of the road carried the scene out of my eyes in an instant, 
and swept it into my dreams for ever. 

Notes 

^Suppose a capital Y (the Pythagorean letter): Lancaster is at the 
foot of this letter; Liverpool at the top of the right branch; Manchester 
at the top of the left; proud Preston at the centre, where the two 
branches unite. It is thirty-three miles along either of the two 
branches; it is twenty-two miles along the stem — viz., from Preston 
in the middle, to Lancaster at the root. There's a lesson in geography 
for the reader. 

^ There were at that time only two assizes even in the most populous 
counties — viz., the Lent Assizes and the Summer Assizes. 

® I owe the suggestion of this word to an obscure remembrance 
of a beautiful phrase in "Giraldus Cambrensis" — viz., Suspiriosse 
cogitationes. 

* It is true that, according to the law of the case as established by 
legal precedents, all carriages were required to give way before Royal 
equipages, and therefore before the mail as one of them. But this 



I 
t 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 22/ 

only increased the danger, as being a regulation very imperfectly made 
known, very unequally enforced, and therefore often embarrassing the 
movements on both sides. 

^ This is the technical word, and, I presume, derived from the French 
cartayer, to evade a rut or any obstacle. 



Ill 



DREAM-FUGUE 

Founded on the Preceding Theme of Sudden Death 

" Whence the sound 
Of instruments, that made melodious chime, 
Was heard, of harp and organ; and who moved 
Their stops and chords, was seen; his volant touch 
Instinct through all proportions, low and high, 
Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue." * 

Tiimultuosissimamente 

PASSION of sudden death! that once in youth, I read 
and interpreted by the shadows of thy averted signs ! ^ 
— rapture of panic taking the shape (which amongst 
tombs in churches I have seen) of woman bursting 
her sepulchral bonds — of woman's Ionic form bending from 
the ruins of her grave with arching foot, with eyes upraised, 
with clasped adoring hands — waiting, watching, trembling, 
praying for the trumpet's call to rise from dust for ever! 
Ah, vision too fearful of shuddering humanity on the brink 
of almighty abysses ! — vision that didst start back, that 
didst reel away, like a shrivelling scroll from before the 
wrath of fire racing on the wings of the wind! Epilepsy 
so brief of horror, wherefore is it that thou canst not die? 
Passing so suddenly into darkness, wherefore is it that 
still thou sheddest thy sad funeral blights upon the gorgeous 
mosaics of dreams? Fragment of music too passionate, heard 
once, and heard no more, what aileth thee, that thy deep rolling 
chords come up at intervals through all the worlds of sleep, 
and after forty years, have lost no element of horror? 

I. Lo, it is summer — almighty summer! The everlasting 
gates of life and summer are thrown open wide, and on the 
ocean, tranquil and verdant as a savannah, the unknown lady 
from the dreadful vision and I myself are floating — she upon 
a fiery pinnace, and I upon an English three-decker. Both of 
us are wooing gales of festal happiness within the domain of 
* Paradise Lost, Book xi. 
228 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 229 

our common country, within that ancient watery park within 
°hat paThless chase of ocean, where England takes her pleasure 
Is a huntress through winter and summer, from the "smg to the 
setting sun: Ah, what a wilderness of flora beauty was hid- 
den, or was suddenly revealed, upon the tropic islands through 
which the pinnace moved! And upon her deck what a bevy 
of human flowers -young women how lovely, yo""? ^en 
how noble, that were dancing together, ^nd slowly dr. ting 
towards us amidst music and mcense, amidst Wo^soms from 
forests and gorgeous corymbi from vintages, amidst natural 
carolHng and the echoes of sweet girlish laughter Slowly the 
pinnace nears lis, gaily she hails us, and silently she disappears 
^enea^h the shadow of our mighty bows. But then as at some 
signal from heaven, the music, and the carols, and the sweet 
echoing of girlish laughter -all are hushed. Wha evil has 
smkten the pinnace, meeting or overtaking her? Did rum to 
our friends couch within our own dreadful shadow? Was our 
shadow the shadow of death? I looked over the bow for an 
answer, and, behold! the pinnace was dismantled; the revel ana 
S^eTevellers were found no more; the glory of the vintage was 
dust; and the forests with their beau y were eft without a 
witn^s upon the seas. " But where," and I turned to our 
Trew-" where are the lovely women that danced beneath the 
awning of flowers and clustering corymbi! Whither have fled 
the noble young men that danced with them? " Answer there 
wi none But suddenly the man at the masthead, whose coun- 
tenance darkened with darm, cried out, "Sail on the weather 
beam! Down she comes upon us: in seventy seconds she also 

win founden'^ to the weather side, and the summer had 
departed. The sea was rocking, and shaken with gathering 
S Upon its surface sat mighty mists, which grouped 
tTemskves^rnto arches and long cathedral aisles. Down one 
of these, with the fiery pace of a quarrel from a cross_bow ran 

a frio-ate right athwart our course. Are they mad? some 
a iriodic i.g. u ^, J ruin?" 

voice exclaimed from our deck. uo ^^^y J" :^^,,Ue of a 
But in a moment, she was close upon u^' X^"?Pf t'<,°her 
headv current or local vortex gave a wheeling bias to ner 
course and oft she forged without a shock As she ran past 
us hTeh aloft amongst the shrouds stood the lady of the pin- 
nace The deeps opened ahead in malice to receive her tower- 
"nTsurges of foan? ran after her, the billows were fierce to 
catch hfr But far away she was borne into desert spaces of 
the sea: whilst still by sight I followed her as she ran before 



230 DE QUINCEY 

the howling gale, chased by angry sea-birds and by madden- 
ing billows; still I saw her, as at the moment when she ran 
past us, standing amongst the shrouds, with her white draperies 
streaming before the wind. There she stood, with hair dishev- 
elled, one hand clutched amongst the tackling — rising, sink- 
ing, fluttering, trembling, praying — there for leagues I saw 
her as she stood, raising at intervals one hand to heaven, 
amidst the fiery crests of the pursuing waves and the raving of 
the storm; until at last, upon a sound from afar of malicious 
laughter and mockery, all was hidden for ever in driving 
showers ; and afterwards, but when I know not, nor how. 

III. Sweet funeral bells from some incalculable distance, 
wailing over the dead that die before the dawn, awakened me 
as I slept in a boat moored to some familiar shore. The morn- 
ing twilight even then was breaking; and, by the dusky revela- 
tions which it spread, I saw a girl, adorned with a garland of 
white roses about her head for some great festival, running 
along the solitary strand in extremity of haste. Her running 
was the running of panic; and often she looked back as to 
some dreadful enemy in the rear. But when I leaped ashore, 
and followed on her steps to warn her of a peril in front, alas! 
from me she fled as from another peril, and vainly I shouted 
to her of quicksands that lay ahead. Faster and faster she ran; 
round a promontory of rocks she wheeled out of sight ; in an 
instant I also wheeled round it, but only to see the treacherous 
sands gathering above her head. Already her person was 
buried ; only the fair young head and the diadem of white roses 
around it were still visible to the pitying heavens: and, last of 
all was visible one white marble arm. I saw by the early twi- 
light this fair young head, as it was sinking down to darkness — 
saw this marble arm, as it rose above her head and her treach- 
erous grave, tossing, faltering, rising, clutching as at some 
false deceiving hand stretched out from the clouds — saw this 
marble arm uttering her dying hope, and then uttering her 
dying despair. The head, the diadem, the arm — these all had 
sunk; at last over these also the cruel quicksand had closed; 
and no memorial of the fair young girl remained on earth, 
except my own solitary tears, and the funeral bells from the 
desert seas, that, rising again more softly, sang a requiem over 
the grave of the buried child, and over her blighted dawn. 

I sat, and wept in secret the tears that men have ever given 
to the memory of those that died before the dawn, and by the 
treachery of earth, our mother. But suddenly the tears and 
funeral bells were hushed by a shout as of many nations, and 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 23 1 

by a roar as from some great king's artillery, advancing rapidly 
along the valleys, and heard afar by echoes from the moun- 
tains. " Hush! " I said, as I bent my ear earthwards to listen 
— " hush ! —^ this either is the very anarchy of strife, or else " — 
and then I listened more profoundly, and whispered as I raised 
my head — " or else, oh heavens ! it is victory that is final, 
victory that swallows up all strife." 

IV. Immediately, in trance, I was carried over land and sea 
to some distant kingdom, and placed upon a triumphal car, 
amongst companions crowned with laurel. The darkness of 
gathering midnight, brooding over all the land, hid from us 
the mighty crowds that were weaving restlessly about ourselves 
as a centre: we heard them, but saw them not. Tidings had 
arrived, within an hour, of a grandeur that measured itself 
against centuries; too full of pathos they were, too full of joy, 
to utter themselves by other language than by tears, by rest- 
less anthems, and Te Deums reverberated from the choirs and 
orchestras of earth. These tidings we that sat upon the laur- 
elled car had it for our privilege to publish amongst all nations. 
And already, by signs audible through the darkness, by snort- 
ings and tramplings, our angry horses, that knew no fear of 
fleshy weariness, upbraided us with delay. Wherefore was it 
that we delayed? We waited for a secret word that should 
bear witness to the hope of nations, as now accomplished for 
ever. At midnight the secret word arrived ; which word was — 
" Waterloo and Recovered Christendom ! " The dreadful word 
shone by its own light; before us it went; high above our lead- 
ers' heads it rode, and spread a golden light over the paths 
which we traversed. Every city, at the presence of the secret 
word, threw open its gates. The rivers were conscious as we 
crossed. All the forests, as we ran along their margins, shiv- 
ered in homage to the secret word. And the darkness com- 
prehended it. 

Two hours after midnight we approached a mighty Minster. 
Its gates, which rose to the clouds, were closed. But when 
the dreadful word, that rode before us, reached them with its 
golden light, silently they moved back upon their hinges; and 
at a flying gallop our equipage entered the grand aisle of the 
cathedral. Headlong was our pace; and at every altar, in the 
little chapels and oratories to the right hand and left of our 
course, the lamps, dying or sickening, kindled anew in sym- 
pathy with the secret word that was flying past. Forty 
leagues we might have run in the cathedral, and as yet no 
strength of morning light had reached us when before us we 



232 DE QUINCEY 

saw the aerial galleries of organ and choir. Every pinnacle of 
the fretwork, every station of advantage amongst the traceries, 
was crested by white-robed choristers, that sang deliverance; 
that wept no more tears, as once their fathers had wept; but 
at intervals that sang together to the generations, saying, 

" Chant the deliverer's praise in every tongue," 

and receiving answers from afar, 

" Such as once in heaven and earth were sung." 

And of their chanting was no end; of our headlong pace was 
neither pause nor slackening. 

Thus, as we ran like torrents — thus, as we swept with bridal 
rapture over the Campo Santo^ of the cathedral graves — sud- 
denly we became aware of a vast necropolis rising upon the far- 
off horizon — a city of sepulchres, built within the saintly 
cathedral for the warrior dead that rested from their feuds on 
earth. Of purple granite was the necropolis; yet, in the first 
minute, it lay like a purple stain upon the horizon, so mighty 
was the distance. In the second minute it trembled through 
many changes, growing into terraces and towers of wondrous 
altitude, so mighty was the pace. In the third minute already, 
with our dreadful gallop, we were entering the suburbs. Vast 
sarcophagi rose on every side, having towers and turrets that, 
upon the limits of the central aisle, strode forward with haughty 
intrusion, that ran back with mighty shadows into answering 
recesses. Every scarcophagus showed many bas-reliefs — bas- 
reliefs of battles and of battle-fields; battles from forgotten 
ages — battles from yesterday — battle-fields that, long since, 
nature had healed and reconciled to herself with the sweet 
oblivion of flowers — battle-fields that were yet angry and 
crimson with carnage. Where the terraces ran, there did we 
run; where the towers curved, there did we curve. With the 
flight of swallows our horses swept round every angle. Like 
rivers in flood, wheeling round headlands — hke hurricanes 
that ride into the secrets of forests — faster than ever light 
unwove the mazes of darkness, our flying equipage carried 
earthly passions, kindled warrior instincts, amongst the dust 
that lay around us — dust oftentimes of our noble fathers that 
had slept in God from Crecy to Trafalgar. And now had we 
reached the last sarcophagus, now were we abreast of the last 
bas-relief, already had we recovered the arrow-like flight of 
the illimitable central aisle, when coming up this aisle to meet 
us we beheld afar off a female child, that rode in a carriage as 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 233 

frail as flowers. The mists, which went before her, hid the 
fawns that drew her, but could not hide the shells and tropic 
flowers with which she played — but could not hide the lovely 
smiles by which she uttered her trust in the mighty cathedral, 
and in the cherubim that looked down upon her from the 
mighty shafts of its pillars. Face to face she was meeting us; 
face to face she rode, as if danger there were none. " Oh, 
baby! '' I exclaimed, " shalt thou be the ransom for Waterloo? 
Must we, that carry tidings of great joy to every people be 
messengers of ruin to thee! " In horror I rose at the thought; 
but then also, in horror at the thought, rose one that was 
sculptured on a bas-relief — a Dying Trumpeter. Solemnly 
from the field of battle he rose to his feet; and, unslinging his 
stony trumpet, carried it, in his dying anguish, to his stony 
lips — sounding once, and yet once again; proclamation that, 
in thy ears, oh baby! spoke from the battlements of death. 
Immediately deep shadows fell between us, and aboriginal 
silence. The choir had ceased to sing. The hoofs of our 
horses, the dreadful rattle of our harness, the groaning of our 
wheels, alarmed the graves no more. By horror the bas-relief 
had been unlocked into life. By horror we, that were so full 
of life, we men and our horses, with their fiery fore-legs rising 
in mid air to their everlasting gallop, were frozen to a bas- 
relief. Then a third time the trumpet sounded; the seals were 
taken off all pulses; life, and the frenzy of life, tore into their 
channels again; again the choir burst forth in sunny grandeur, 
as from the muffling of storms and darkness; again the thun- 
derings of our horses carried temptation into the graves. One 
cry burst from our lips, as the clouds, drawing off from the 
aisle, showed it empty before us — "Whither has the infant 
fled? — is the young child caught up to God?" Lo! afar off, 
in a vast recess, rose three mighty windows to the clouds; and 
on a level with their summits, at height insuperable to man, 
rose an altar of purest alabaster. On its eastern face was 
trembling a crimson glory. A glory was it from the reddening 
dawn that now streamed through the windows? Was it from 
the crimson robes of the martyrs painted on the windows? 
Was it from the bloody bas-reliefs of earth? There, suddenly, 
within that crimson radiance, rose the apparition of a woman's 
head, and then of a woman's figure. The child it was — 
grown up to woman's height. Clinging to the horns of the 
altar, voiceless she stood — sinking, rising, raving, despairing; 
and behind the volume of incense, that, night and day, streamed 
upwards from the altar, dimly was seen the fiery font, and the 



234 D^ QUINCE Y 

shadow of that dreadful being who should have baptized her 
with the baptism of death. But by her side was kneeling her 
better angel, that hid his face with wings; that wept and 
pleaded for her; that prayed when she could not; that fought 
with Heaven by tears for her deliverance; which also, as he 
raised his immortal countenance from his wings, I saw, by the 
glory in his eye, that from Heaven he had won at last. 

V. Then was completed the passion of the mighty fugue. 
The golden tubes of the organ, which as yet had but muttered 
at intervals — gleaming amongst clouds and surges of incense 
— threw up, as from fountains unfathomable, columns of heart- 
shattering music. Choir and anti-choir were filling fast with 
unknown voices. Thou also, Dying Trumpeter! — with thy 
love that was victorious, and thy anguish that was finishing — 
didst enter the tumult ; trumpet and echo — farewell love, and 
farewell anguish — rang -through the dreadful sanctus. Oh, 
darkness of the grave! that from the crimson altar and from 
the fiery font wert visited and searched by the effulgence in the 
angel's eye — were these indeed thy children? Pomps of life, 
that, from the burials of centuries, rose again to the voice of 
perfect joy, did ye indeed mingle with the festivals of Death? 
Lo! as I looked back for seventy leagues through the mighty 
cathedral, I saw the quick and the dead that sang together to 
God, together that sang to the generations of man. All the 
hosts of jubilation, like armies that ride in pursuit, moved with 
one step. Us, that, with laurelled heads, were passing from 
the cathedral, they overtook, and, as with a garment, they 
wrapped us round with thunders greater than our own. As 
brothers we moved together; to the dawn that advanced — to 
the stars that fled; rendering thanks to God in the highest — 
that, having hid his face through one generation behind thick 
clouds of War, once again was ascending — from the Campo 
Santo of Waterloo was ascending — in the visions of Peace; 
rendering thanks for thee, young girl! whom, having over- 
shadowed with his ineffable passion of death, suddenly did 
God relent; suffered thy angel to turn aside his arm; and even 
in thee, sister unknown! shown to me for a moment only to 
be hidden for ever, found an occasion to glorify his goodness. 
A thousand times, amongst the phantoms of sleep, have I seen 
thee entering the gates of the golden dawn — with the secret 
word riding before thee — with the armies of the grave behind 
thee: seen thee sinking, rising, raving, despairing; a thousand 
times in the worlds of sleep have seen thee followed by God's 
angel through storms; through desert seas; through the dark- 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 235 

ness of quicksands; through dreams, and the dreadful revela- 
tions that are in dreams — only that at the last, with one sling 
of his victorious arm, he might snatch thee back from ruin, and 
might emblazon in thy deliverance the endless resurrections of 
his love! 

Notes. 

^ I read the course and changes of the lady's agony in the succes- 
sion of her involuntary gestures; but it must be remembered that I 
read all this from the rear, never once catching the lady's full face, and 
even her profile imperfectly. 

^ It is probable that most of my readers will be acquainted with the 
history of the Campo Santo (or cemetery) at Pisa, composed of earth 
brought from Jerusalem for a bed of sanctity, as the highest prize which 
the noble piety of crusaders could ask or imagine. To readers who are 
unacquainted with England, or who (being Englieh) are yet unac- 
quainted with the cathedral cities of England, it may be right to men- 
tion that the graves within-side the cathedrals often form a flat pave- 
ment over which carriages and horses might run; and perhaps a boyish 
remembrance of one particular cathedral, across which I had seen 
passengers walk and burdens carried, as about two centuries back they 
were through the middle of St. Paul's in London, may have assisted 
my dream. 



LITERARY REMINISCENCES 



LITERARY REMINISCENCES 



CHARLES LAMB 



AMONGST the earliest literary acquaintances I made 
was that with the inimitable Charles Lamb: inimitable, 
I say, but the word is too limited in its meaning; for, 
as is said of Milton in that well-known life of him 
attached to all common editions of the " Paradise Lost, 
(Fenton's, I think,) " in both senses he was above imita- 
tion " Yes; it was as impossible to the moral nature of 
Charles Lamb that he should imitate another, as, in an intel- 
lectual sense, it was impossible that any other should success- 
fully imitate him. To write with patience even, not to say 
eenially, for Oiarles Lamb it was a very necessity of his con- 
Ititution that he should write from his own wayward nature; 
and that nature was so peculiar that no other man, the ablest 
at mimicry, could counterfeit its voice But let me not antici- 
pate; for these were opinions about Lamb which I had not 
when I first knew him, nor could have had by any reasonable 
title " Elia," be it observed, the exquisite Elia," was then 
unborn; Lamb had as yet published nothing to the world which 
proclaimed him in his proper character of a most original man 
of genius:' at best, he could have been thought no more than 
a man of talent -and of talent moving in a narrow path, with 
a power rather of mimicking the quaint and the fantastic than 
any large grasp over catholic beauty. And, therefore, it need 
not ofind the most doting admirer of Lamb as he is now 
known to us, a brilliant star for ever fixed in the firmament o 
EngTish literature, that I acknowledge myself to have sought 
Ws acquaintance rather under the reflex honour he had enjoyed 
of being known as Coleridge's friend, than for any which he 
yet hdd directly and separately in his own person. My earliest 



240 DE QUINCEY 

advances towards this acquaintance had an inauspicious 
aspect; and it may be worth while reporting the circumstances, 
for they were characteristic of Charles Lamb; and the imme- 
diate result was — that we parted, not perhaps (as Lamb says 
of his philosophic friend R. and the Parisians) " with mutual 
contempt," but at least with coolness; and on my part, with 
something that might have even turned to disgust — founded, 
however, entirely on my utter misapprehension of Lamb's 
character and his manners — had it not been for the winning 
goodness of Miss Lamb, before which all resentment must 
have melted in a moment. 

It was either late in 1804 or early in 1805, according to my 
present computations, that I had obtained from a literary friend 
a letter of introduction to Mr. Lamb. All that I knew of his 
works was his play of " John Woodvil," which I had bought in 
Oxford, and perhaps I only had bought throughout that great 
University, at the time of my matriculation there, about the 
Christmas of 1803. Another book fell into my hands on that 
same morning, I recollect — the " Gebir " of Mr. Walter Savage 
Landor — which astonished me by the splendour of its descrip- 
tions (for I had opened accidentally upon the sea-nymph's 
marriage with Tamor, the youthful brother of Gebir) — and I 
bought this also. Afterwards, when placing these two most 
unpopular of books on the same shelf with the other far holier 
idols of my heart, the joint poems of Wordsworth and Cole- 
ridge as then associated in the " Lyrical Ballads " — poems not 
equally unknown, perhaps a little better known, but only with 
the result of being more openly scorned, rejected — I could 
not but smile internally at the fair prospect I had of congre- 
gating a library which no man had read but myself. "John 
Woodvil " I had almost studied, and Miss Lamb's pretty 
" High-Born Helen," and the ingenious imitations of Burton ; 
these I had read, and, to a certain degree, must have admired, 
for some parts of them had settled without effort in my memory. 
I had read also the Edinburgh notice of them; and with what 
contempt may be supposed from the fact, that my veneration 
for Wordsworth transcended all that I felt for any created being, 
past or present ; insomuch that, in the summer, or spring rather, 
of that same year, and full eight months before I first went to 
Oxford, I had ventured to address a letter to him, through his 
publishers, the Messrs. Longman, (which letter. Miss Words- 
worth in after years assured me they believed to be the pro- 
duction of some person much older than I represented myself,) 
and that in due time I had been honoured by a long answer from 



CHARLES LAMB 24 1 

Wordsworth; an honour which, I well remember, kept me 
awake, from mere excess of pleasure, through a long night in 
Tune 180S. It was not to be supposed that the very feeblest of 
admirations could be shaken by mere scorn and contumely, 
unsupported by any shadow of a reason. Wordsworth, there- 
fore could not have suffered in any man s opinion, from the 
puny efforts of this new autocrat amongst reviews; but what 
was said of Lamb, though not containing one iota of criticism, 
either eood or bad, had certainly more point and cleverness. 
The supposition that " John Woodvil" might be a lost drama, 
recovered from the age of Thespis, and entitled to the hircus, 
etc., must, I should think, have won a smile from Lamb him- 
self- or why say " Lamb himself," which means even Lamb, 
when he would have been the very first to laugh, (as he was 
afterwards among the first to hoot at his own farce,) provided 
only he could detach his mind from the ill-nature and hard 
contempt which accompanied the wit. Tliis wit had certainly 
not dazzled my eyes in the slightest degree. So far as i was 
left at leisure, by a more potent order of poetry, to think ot the 
" John Woodvil " at all, I had felt and acknowledged a delicacy 
and tenderness in the situations as well as the sentiments, but 
disfigured, as I thought,, by quaint, grotesque, and mimetic 
phraseology. The main defect, however, of which i com- 
plained, was defect of power. I thought Lamb had no right 
to take his station amongst the inspired writers who had just 
then risen, to throw new blood into our literature, and to 
breathe a breath of life through the worn-out, or, at least torpid 
organization of the national mind. He belonged I thought, 
to the old literature; and, as a poet, he certainly does. There 
were in his verses minute scintillations of genius --now and 
then, even a subtle sense of beauty; and there were shy graces, 
lurking half-unseen, like violets in the shade. But there was 
no power on a colossal scale; no breadth; no choice of great 
subjects; no wrestHng with difficulty; no creative energy, bo 
I thought then; and so I should think now, if Lamb were 
viewed chiefly as a poet. Since those days, he has established 
his ri^ht to a seat in any company. But why? and in what 
character? As " Elia: "— the essays of " Eha " are as exquisite 
a ^em amongst the jewellery of literature, as any nation can 
show. They do not, indeed, suggest to the typifying imagina- 
tion a " Last Supper " of Da Vinci, or a group from the Sistine 
Chapel- but they suggest some exquisite cabinet painting; such, 
for instance, as that Carlo Dolce known to all who have visited 
Lord Exeter's place of Burleigh; (by the way, I bar the allu- 
16 



242 DE QUINCEY 

sion to Charles Lamb, which a shameless punster suggests in 
the name Carlo Dolce ;) and in this also resembling that famous 
picture — that many critics (Hazlitt amongst others) can see 
little or nothing in it. Quam nihil ad genium, Papiniane, 
tuum! Those, therefore, err in my opinion, who present Lamb 
to our notice amongst the poets. Very pretty, very elegant, 
very tender, very beautiful verses he has written; nay, twice he 
has written verses of extraordinary force, almost demoniac 
force — viz., " The Three Graves,'' and '' The Gipsy's Malison." 
But, speaking generally, he writes verses as one to whom that 
function was a secondary and occasional function; not his 
original and natural vocation; not an ^pyov, but a T.dpepyov. 

For the reasons, therefore, I have given, never thinking of 
Charles Lamb as a poet, and, at that time, having no means for 
judging of him in any other character, I had requested the 
letter of introduction to him, rather with a view to some further 
knowledge of Coleridge, (who was then absent from England,) 
than from any special interest about Lamb himself. However, 
I felt the extreme discourtesy of approaching a man, and asking 
for his time and civility under such an avowal: and the letter, 
therefore, as I believe, or as I requested, represented me in the 
light of an admirer. I hope it did; for that character might 
have some excuse for what followed, and heal the unpleasant 
impression likely to be left by a sort of fracas which occurred 
at my first meeting with Lamb. This was so characteristic 
of Lamb, that I have often laughed at it since I cam.e to know 
what was characteristic of Lamb. But first let me describe 
my brief introductory call upon him at the India House. I 
had been told that he was never to be found at home except 
in the evenings; and to have called then Vn^ouW have been, in 
a manner, forcing myself upon his hospitalities, and at a 
moment when he might have confidential friends about him; 
besides that, he was sometimes tempted away to the theatres. 
I went, therefore, to the India House; made inquiries amongst 
the servants; and, after some trouble, (for that was early in 
his Leadenhall Street career, and possibly, he was not much 
known,) I was shown into a small room, or else a small sec- 
tion of a large one, (thirty-four years afifects one's remem- 
brance of some circumstances,) in which was a very lofty 
writing-desk, separated by a still higher railing from that part 
of the floor on which the profane — the laity, like myself — 
were allowed to approach the clerus, or clerkly rulers of the 
room. Within the railing, sat, to the best of my remembrance, 
six quill-driving gentlemen ; not gentlemen whose duty or pro- 



CHARLES LAMB 243 

fession it was merely to drive the quill, but who were then 
driving it — gens de plume, such in esse, as well as in posse — 
in act as well as habit; for, as if they supposed me a spy, sent by 
some superior power, to report upon the situation of afifairs as 
surprised by me, they were all too profoundly immersed in 
their oriental studies to have any sense of my presence. Con- 
sequently, I was reduced to a necessity of announcing myself 
and my errand. I walked, therefore, into one of the two open 
doorways of the railing, and stood closely by the high stool 
of him who occupied the first place within the little aisle. I 
touched his arm, by way of recalling him from his lofty Lead- 
enhall speculations to this sublunary world; and, presenting 
my letter, asked if that gentleman (pointing to the address) 
were really a citizen of the present room; for I had been 
repeatedly misled, by the directions given me, into wrong 
rooms. The gentleman smiled; it was a smile not to be for- 
gotten. Tliis was Lamb. And here occurred a very, very 
little incident — one of those which pass so fugitively that they 
are gone and hurrying away into Lethe almost before your 
attention can have arrested them; but it was an incident which, 
to me, who happened to notice it, served to express the cour- 
tesy and delicate consideration of Lamb's manners. The seat 
upon which he sat, was 'a very high one; so absurdly high, 
by the way, that I can imagine no possible use or sense in such 
an altitude, unless it were to restrain the occupant from playing 
truant at the fire, by opposing Alpine difficulties to his descent. 
Whatever might be the original purpose of this aspiring- 
seat, one serious dilemma arose from it, and this it was which 
gave the occasion to Lamb's act of courtesy. Somewhere there 
is an anecdote, meant to illustrate the ultra-obsequiousness of 
the man: either I have heard of it in connection with some 
actual man known to myself, or it is told in a book of some his- 
torical coxcomb — that being on horseback, and meeting some 
person or other whom it seemed advisable to flatter, he actually 
dismounted, in order to pay his court by a more ceremonious 
bow. In Russia, as we all know, this was, at one time, upon 
meeting any of the Imperial family, an act of legal necessity; 
and there, accordingly, but there only, it would have worn no 
ludicrous aspect. Now, in this situation of Lamb's, the act of 
descending from his throne, a very elaborate process, with 
steps and stages analogous to those on horseback — of slipping 
your right foot out of the stirrup, throwing your leg over the 
crupper, etc. — was, to all intents and purposes, the same thing 
as dismounting from a great elephant of a horse. Therefore, 



244 ^^ QUINCE Y 

it both was, and was felt to be by Lamb, supremely ludicrous. 
On the other hand, to have sat still and stately upon this aerial 
station, to have bowed condescendingly from this altitude, 
would have been — not ludicrous indeed; performed by a very 
superb person, and supported by a very superb bow, it might 
have been vastly fine, and even terrifying to many young gen- 
tlemen under sixteen ; but it would have had an air of ungentle- 
manly assumption. Between these extremes, therefore, Lamb 
had to choose : — between appearing ridiculous himself for a 
moment, by going through a ridiculous evolution, which no 
man could execute with grace; or, on the other hand, appearing 
lofty and assuming, in a degree which his truly humble nature 
(for he was the humblest of men in the pretensions which he put 
forward for himself) must have shrunk from with horror. 
Nobody who knew Lamb can doubt how the problem was 
solved; he began to dismount instantly; and, as it happened 
that the very first round of his descent obliged him to turn his 
back upon me as if for a sudden purpose of flight, he had an 
excuse for laughing; which he did heartily — saying, at the 
same time, something to this effect, that I must not judge from 
first appearances ; that he should revolve upon me ; that he was 
not going to fly ; and other facetiae, which challenged a general 
laugh from the clerical brotherhood. 

When he had reached the basis of terra firma on which I was 
standing, naturally, as a mode of thanking him for his courtesy, 
I presented my hand; which, in a general case, I should cer- 
tainly not have done; for I cherished in an ultra-English degree, 
the English custom (a wise custom) of bowing in frigid silence 
on a first introduction to a stranger; but, to a man of literary 
talent, and one who had just practiced so much kindness in my 
favour at so probable a hazard to himself of being laughed at for 
his pains, I could not maintain that frosty reserve. Lamb took 
my hand; did not absolutely reject it; but rather repelled my 
advance by his manner. This, however, long afterwards I 
found, was only a habit derived from his too great sensitiveness 
to the variety of people's feelings, which run through a gamut 
so infinite of degrees and modes as to make it unsafe for any 
man who respects himself, to be too hasty in his allowances of 
familiarity. Lamb had, as he was entitled to have, a high self- 
respect; and me he probably suspected (as a young Oxonian) 
of some aristocratic tendencies. The letter of introduction, 
containing (I imagine) no matters of business, was speedily 
run through; and I instantly received an invitation to spend 
the evening with him. Lamb was not one of those who catch 



CHARLES LAMB 245 

at the chance of escaping from a bore by fixing some distant 
day, when accidents (in duplicate proportion, perhaps, to the 
number of intervening days) may have carried you away from 
the place; he sought to benefit by no luck of that kind; for he 
was, with his limited income — and I say it deliberately — posi- 
tively the most hospitable man I have known in this world. 
That night, the same night, I was to come and spend the even- 
ing with him. I had gone to the India House with the express 
purpose of accepting whatever invitation he should give me; 
and, therefore, I accepted this, took my leave, and left Lamb in 
the act of resuming his aerial position. 

I was to come so early as to drink tea with Lamb; and the 
hour was seven. He lived in the Temple ; and I, who was not 
then, as afterwards I became, a student and member of " the 
Honourable Society of the Middle Temple," did not know much 
of the localities. However, I found out his abode, not greatly 
beyond my time: nobody had been asked to meet me, which a 
little surprised me, but I was glad of it; for, besides Lamb, there 
was present, his sister. Miss Lamb, of whom, and whose talents 
and sweetness of disposition, I had heard. I turned the con- 
versation, upon the first opening which offered, to the subject 
of Coleridge; and many of my questions were answered 
satisfactorily, because seriously, by Miss Lamb. But Lamb 
took a pleasure in baffling me, or in throwing ridicule upon the 
subject. Out of this grew the matter of our affray. We were 
speaking of "The Ancient Mariner." Now to explain what 
followed, and a little to excuse myself, I must beg the reader to 
understand that I was under twenty years of age, and that my 
admiration for Coleridge (as in, perhaps, a still greater degree, 
for Wordsworth) was literally in no respect short of a religious 
feeling: it had, indeed, all the sanctity of reHgion, and all the 
tenderness of a human veneration. Then, also, to imagine the 
strength which it would derive from circumstances that do not 
exist now, but did then, let the reader further suppose a case — 
not such as he may have known since that era about Sir Walter 
Scotts and Lord Byrons, where every man you could possibly 
fall foul of, early or late, night or day, summer or winter, was 
in perfect readiness to feel and express his sympathy with the 
admirer — but when no man, beyond one or two in each ten 
thousand, had so much as heard of either Coleridge or Words- 
worth; and that one, or those two, knew them only to scorn 
them — trample on them — spit upon them: men so abject in 
public estimation, I maintain, as that Coleridge and that 
Wordsworth, had not existed before — have not existed since 



246 DE QUINCE Y 

— will not exist ag^in. We have heard in old times, of don- 
keys insulting effete or dying lions, by kicking them; but in the 
case of Coleridge and Wordsworth it was effete donkeys that 
kicked living lions. They, Coleridge and Wordsworth, were 
the Pariahs of literature in those days: as much scorned 
wherever they were known, but escaping that scorn only 
because they were as little known as Pariahs, and even more 
obscure. 

Well, after this bravura, by way of conveying my sense of the 
real position then occupied by these two authors — a position 
which thirty and odd years have altered, by a revolution more 
astonishing and total than ever before happened in literature or 
in life — let the reader figure to himself the sensitive horror 
with which a young person, carrying his devotion about with 
him, of necessity, as the profoundest of secrets, like a primitive 
Christian amongst a nation of Pagans, or a Roman Catholic 
convert amongst the bloody idolaters of Japan — in Oxford, 
above all places, hoping for no sympathy, and feeling a daily 
grief, almost a shame, in harbouring this devotion to that which, 
nevertheless, had done more for the expansion and sustenance 
of his own inner mind than all literature besides — let the reader 
figure, I say to himself, the shock with which such a person 
must recoil from hearing the very friend and associate of these 
authors utter what seemed at that time a burning ridicule of all 
which belonged to them — their books, their thoughts, their 
places, their persons. This had gone on for some time, before 
we came upon the ground of "The Ancient Mariner;" I had 
been grieved, perplexed, astonished; and how else could I have 
felt reasonably, knowing nothing of Lamb's propensity to 
mystify a stranger; he, on the other hand, knowing nothing of 
the depth of my feelings on these subjects, and that they were 
not so much mere literary preferences as something that went 
deeper than life or household affections? At length, when he 
had given utterance to some ferocious canon of judgment, 
which seemed to question the entire value of the poem, I said, 
perspiring, (I dare say), in this detestable crisis — '* But, Mr. 
Lamb, good heavens! how is it possible you can allow yourself 
in such opinions? What instance could you bring from the 
poem that would bear you out in these insinuations?" 
" Instances! " said Lamb: " oh, I'll instance you, if you come to 
that. Instance, indeed ! Pray, what do you say to this — 

" The many men so beautiful, 
And they all dead did lie? " 

So beautiful, indeed! Beautiful! Just think of such a gang 



CHARLES LAMB 247 

of Wapping vagabonds, all covered with pitch, and chewing 
tobacco; and the old gentleman himself — what do you 'call 
him? — the bright-eyed fellow?" What more might follow, I 
never heard ; for, at this point, in a perfect rapture of horror, I 
raised my hands — both hands — to both ears ; and, without 
stopping to think or to apologize, I endeavoured to restore 
equanimity to my disturbed sensibilities, by shutting out all 
further knowledge of Lamb's impieties. At length he seemed 
to have finished; so I, on my part, thought I might venture to 
take ofif the embargo; and in fact he had ceased, but no sooner 
did he find me restored to my hearing than he said with a most 
sarcastic smile — which he could assume upon occasion — " If 
you please, sir, we'll say grace before we begin." I know not 
whether Lamb were really piqued or not at the mode by which 
I had expressed my disturbance: Miss Lamb certainly was not; 
her goodness led her to pardon me, and to treat me — in what- 
ever light she might really view my almost involuntary rude- 
ness — as the party who had suffered wrong ; and, for the rest 
of the evening, she was so pointedly kind and conciliatory in 
her manner, that I felt greatly ashamed of my boyish failure in 
self-command. Yet, after all, Lamb necessarily appeared so 
much worse, in my eyes, as a traitor is worse than an open 
enemy. 

Lamb, after this one visit — not knowing at that time any 
particular reason for continuing to seek his acquaintance — I 
did not trouble with my calls for some years. At length, how- 
ever, about the year 1808, and for the six or seven following 
years, in my evening visits to Coleridge, I used to meet him 
again; not often, but sufificiently to correct altogether the very 
false impression I had received of his character and manners. 
I have elsewhere described him as a " Diogenes, with the heart 
of a St. John " — where, by the way, the reader must not, by lay- 
ing the accent falsely on St. John, convert it into the name of 
Lord Bolingbroke: I meant St. John the Evangelist. And by 
ascribing to Lamb any sort of resemblance to Diogenes, I had a 
view only to his plain speaking in the first place — his 
unequalled freedom from every mode of hypocrisy or affecta- 
tion ; and, secondly, to his talent for saying keen, pointed things, 
sudden flashes, or revelations of hidden truths, in a short con- 
densed form of words. In fact, the very foundation of Lamb's 
peculiar character was laid in his absolute abhorrence of all 
affectation. This showed itself in self-disparagement of every 
kind; never the mock disparagement, which is self-praise in an 
indirect form, as when people accuse themselves of all the vir- 



24? DE QUINCEY 

tues, by professing an inability to pay proper attention to pru- 
dence or economy — or uncontrollable disposition to be rash 
and inconsiderate on behalf of a weaker party when suffering 
apparent wrong. But Lamb's confessions of error, of infirmity, 
were never at any time acts of mock humility, meant to involve 
oblique compliment in the rebound. Thus, he honestly and 
frankly confessed his blank insensibility to music. 

" King David's harp, that made the madness flee 
From Saul, had been but a Jew's harp to me," 

is his plain, unvarnished admission, in verses admirable for 
their wit and their elegance: nor did he attempt to break the 
force of this unfortunate truth, by claiming, which, perhaps, he 
might have claimed, a compensatory superiority in the endow- 
ments of his eye. , It happened to him, as I believe it has often 
done to others — to Pope, perhaps, but certainly to Words- 
worth — that the imperfect structure or imperfect development 
of the ear, denying any profound sensibility to the highest 
modes of impassioned music, has been balanced by a more than 
usual sensibility to some modes of visual beauty. 

With respect to Wordsworth, it has been doubted, by some 
of his friends, upon very good grounds, whether, as a connois- 
seur in painting, he has a very learned eye, or one that can be 
relied upon. I hold it to be very doubtful, also, whether 
Wordsworth's judgment in the human face — its features and 
its expression — be altogether sound, and in conformity to the 
highest standards of art. But it is undeniable — and must be 
most familiar to all who have associated upon intimate terms 
with Wordsworth and his sister — that they both derive a 
pleasure, originally and organically more profound than is 
often witnessed, both from the forms and the colouring of rural 
nature. The very same tests by which I recognize my own 
sensibility to music, as rising above the common standard — 
viz., by the indispensableness of it to my daily comfort: the 
readiness with which I make any sacrifices to obtain a " grand 
debauch" of this nature, etc., etc. — these, when applied to 
Wordsworth, manifest him to have an analogous craving, in a 
degree much transcending the general ratio for the luxuries of 
the eye. These luxuries Wordsworth seeks in their great 
original exemplar — in Nature as exhibiting herself amongst 
the bold forms and the rich but harmonious colouring of moun- 
tainous scenery; there especially, where the hand of injudicious 
art, or of mercenary craft, has not much interfered, with 
monotonous repetition of unmeaning forms with offensive out- 
lines, or, still more, with harsh and glaring contrasts of colour. 



CHARLES LAMB 249 



The offence which strikes upon Wordsworth's eye from such 
disfigurations of nature is, really and without affectation, as 
keen, as intense, and as inevitable as to other men the pain to 
the mere physical eye-sight from the glare of snow or the irri- 
tations of flying dust. Lamb, on the other hand, sought his 
pleasures of this class — not, as by this time all the world 
knows, in external nature, for which it was his pleasure to pro- 
fess, not merely an indifference, but even a horror which it 
delighted him to exaggerate with a kind of playful malice to 
those whom he was hoaxing — but in the works of the great 
painters: and for these I have good reason to think that both 
he and his sister had a peculiarly deep sensibility, and, after 
long practice, a fine and matured taste. Here, then, was both 
a gift and an attainment which Lamb might have fairly pleaded 
in the way of a set-off to his acknowledged defects of ear. But 
Lamb was too really and sincerely humble ever to think of 
nursing and tending his own character in any man's estima- 
tion, or of attempting to blunt the effect of his own honest 
avowals of imperfection, by dexterously playing off before your 
eyes some counterbalancing accomplishment. He was, in fact, 
as I have said before, the most humble and unpretending of 
human beings, the most thoroughly sincere, the most impatient 
of either simulation or dissimulation, and the one who threw 
himself the most unreservedly for your good opinion upon the 
plain natural expression of his real qualities, as nature had 
forced them, without artifice, or design, or disguise, more than 
you find in the most childlike of children. ^ 

There was a notion prevalent about Lamb, which I can affirm 
to have been a most erroneous one : it was — that any flagrant 
act of wickedness formed a recommendation to his favour. 
"Ah!" said one man to me, when asking a letter of introduc- 
tion from him— "ah! that I could but recommend you as a 
man that had robbed the mail, or the King's exchequer — 
which would be better. In that case, I need not add a word; 
you would take rank instantly amongst the privileged friends 
of Lamb, without a word from me." Now, as to ." the King's 
Exchequer," I cannot say. A man who should have placed 
himself in relation with Falstaff, by obeying his commands 
at a distance of four centuries, (like the traveller, who demanded 
of the turnpikeman — " How do you like your eggs dressed?' 
and, ten years after, on passing the same gate, received the 
monosyllabic reply " poached," )— that man might have pre- 
sented irresistible claims to Lamb's affection. Shakspeare, or 
anything connected with Shakspeare might have proved too 



250 DE QUINCEY 

much for his Roman virtue. But, putting aside any case so 
impossible as this, I can affirm that — so far from this being 
the truth, or approaching the truth. — a rule the very opposite 
governed Lamb's conduct : — so far from welcoming wicked, 
profligate, or dissolute people by preference, if they happened 
to be clever — he bore with numerous dull people, stupid peo- 
ple, asinine people, for no other reason upon earth than because 
he knew them, or believed them to have been ill-used or 
oppressed by some clever but dissolute man. That was 
enough. Sufficient it was that they had been the objects of 
injustice, calumny, persecution, or wrong in any shape — and, 
without further question, they had " their place allowed " at 
Lamb's fireside. I knew some eminent instances of what I am 
now saying. And I used to think to myself, Were this feature 
of Lamb's character made known, and the natural results fol- 
lowed, what would he do? Refuse anybody, reject anybody, 
tell him to begone, he could not, no more than he could have 
danced upon his mother's grave. He would have received all 
who presented themselves with any rational pretensions; and 
would finally have gone to prison rather than reject anybody. 
I do not say this rhetorically. I knew Lamb ; and I know cer- 
tain cases in which he was concerned — cases which it is diffi- 
cult to publish with any regard to the feelings of persons now 
living, but which (if published in all their circumstances) would 
show him to be the very noblest of human beings. He was a 
man, in a sense more eminent than would be conceivable by 
many people, princely — nothing short of that in his benefi- 
cence. Many liberal people 1 have known in this world — 
many who were charitable in the widest sense — many munifi- 
cent people; but never any one upon whom, for bounty, for 
indulgence and forgiveness, for charitable construction of 
doubtful or mixed actions, and for regal munificence, you 
might have thrown yourself with so absolute a reliance as upon 
this comparatively poor Charles Lamb. Considered as a man 
of genius, he was not in the very first rank, simply because his 
range was a contracted one: within that range, he was perfect; 
of the peculiar powers which he possessed, he has left to the 
world as exquisite a specimen as this planet is likely to exhibit. 
But, as a moral being, in the total compass of his relations to 
this world's duties, in the largeness and diffusiveness of his 
charity, in the graciousness of his condescension to inferior 
intellects, I am disposed, after a deliberate review of my own 
entire experience, to pronounce him the best man, the nearest 
in his approaches to an ideal standard of excellence, that I have 



CHARLES LAMB 25 I 

known or read of. In the mingled purity — a childlike 
purity — and the benignity of his nature, I again express my 
own deep feeling of the truth, when I say that he recalled to 
m)/ mind the image and character of St. John the Evangelist — 
of him who was at once the beloved apostle, and also, more 
peculiarly, the apostle of love. Well and truly, therefore, did 
the poet say, in his beautiful lines upon this man's grave and 
memory — 

" Oh, he was good, if e'er a good man lived! " ' 

Perhaps the foundation for the false notion I have mentioned 
about Lamb's predilections, was to be found in his carelessness 
for those social proscriptions which have sometimes occurred 
in our stormy times with respect to writers, male and female, 
who set the dominant notions, or the prevailing feelings of 
men — (feelings with regard to sexual proprieties, to social dis- 
tinctions, to the sanctity of property, to the sanctity of religious 
formulae, etc., etc.) — at open defiance. Take, for example, 
Thelwall, at one time, Holcroft, Godwin, Mrs. Wolstonecraft, 
Dr. Priestley, Hazlitt, all of whom were, more or less, in a back- 
ward or inverse sense, tabooed — that is, consecrated to public 
hatred and scorn — with respect to all these persons, feeling 
that the public alienation had gone too far, or had begun 
originally upon false grounds, Lamb threw his heart and his 
doors wide open. Politics — what cared he for politics? 
Religion — in the sense of theological dogmas — what cared 
he for religion? For religion in its moral aspects, and its rela- 
tions to the heart of man no human being ever cared more. 
With respect to politics, some of his friends could have wished 
him to hate men when they grew anti-national, and in that 
case only; but he would not. He persisted in liking men who 
made an idol of Napoleon, who sighed over the dread name of 
Waterloo, and frowned upon Trafalgar. There I thought him 
wrong; but, in that, as one of my guardians used to say of me, 
he " followed his own devil; " though, after all, I believe he took 
a secret silent pleasure in the grandeur of his country, and 
would have suffered in her suffering — would have been 
humiliated in her humiliation — more than he altogether 
acknowledged to himself; in fact, his carelessness grew out of 
the depth of his security. He could well afford to be free of 
anxiety in a case like this; for the solicitudes of jealous affec- 
tion, the tremulous and apprehensive love, as " of a mother or 
a child," (which painful mood of love Wordsworth professes 
for his country, but only in a wayward fit of passion), could 
scarcely be thought applicable, even in the worst days of Napo- 



252 DE QUINCE Y 

leon, to a national grandeur and power which seem as little 
liable to chance or change, as essentially unapproachable by 
any serious impeachment, as the principle of gravitation or the 
composition of the air. Why, therefore, should he trouble him- 
self more about the nice momentary oscillations of the national 
fortunes in war or council, more than about adjusting his bal- 
ance, so as not to disturb the equilibrium of the earth ? 

There was another trait of character about Charles Lamb, 
which might have countenanced the common notion that he 
looked indulgently upon dissolute men, or men notorious for 
some criminal escapade. This was his thorough hatred of all 
hypocrisy, and his practical display of that hatred on all pos- 
sible occasions. Even in a point so foreign, as it might seem, 
from this subject as his style, though chiefly founded upon his 
intellectual differences and his peculiar taste, the prevailing 
tone of it was in part influenced (or at least sustained) by his 
disgust for all which transcended the naked simplicity of truth. 
This is a deep subject, with as many faces, or facets, (to speak 
the language of jewellers), as a rose-cut diamond; and far be it 
from me to say one word in praise of those — people of how 
narrow a sensibility ! — who imagine that a simple (that is, 
according to many tastes, an unelevated and unrhythmical) 
style — take, for instance, an Addisonian or a Swiftian style — 
is unconditionally good. Not so; all depends upon the sub- 
ject; and there is a style, transcending these and all other modes 
of simplicity, by infinite degrees, and, in the same proportion, 
impossible to most men — the rhythmical — the continuous — 
what, in French, is called the soutenu, which, to humbler styles, 
stands in the relation of an organ to a shepherd's pipe. This 
also finds its justification in its subject; and the subject which 
can justify it must be of a corresponding quality — loftier — 
and, therefore, rare. 

If, then, in style — so indirect an expression as that must be 
considered of his nature and moral feelings — how much more, 
in their direct and conscious expressions, was Lamb impatient 
of hypocrisy! Hypocrisy may be considered as the heroic 
form of affectation. Now, the very basis of Lamb's character 
was laid in downright horror of affectation. If he found him- 
self by accident using a rather fine word, notwithstanding it 
might be the most forcible in that place, (the word " arrest,'' 
suppose, in certain situations, for the word " catch "), he would, 
if it were allowed to stand, make merry with his own grandilo- 
quence at the moment; and, in after moments, he would con- 
tinually ridicule that class of words, by others carried to an 



CHARLES LAMB 253 

extreme of pedantry — the word " arride," for instance, used in 
the sense of pleasing, or winning the approbation — just as 
Charles Fox, another patron of simplicity, or, at least, of 
humility in style was accustomed to use the word " vilipend," 
as a standing way of sarcastically recalling to the reader's mind 
the Latinizing writers of English. Hence — that is, from this 
intense sincerity and truth of character — Lamb would allow 
himself to say things that shocked the feelings of the company 
— shocked sometimes in the sense of startling or electrifying, as 
by something that was odd; but also sometimes shocked with 
the sense of what was revolting, as by a Swiftian laying bare of 
naked shivering human nature. Such exposures of masquerad- 
ing vanity — such surgical probings and vexings of the secret 
feelings — I have seen almost truculently pursued by Lamb. 
He seemed angry and fierce in such cases only; but the anger 
was for the affectation and insincerity, which he could not 
endure, unless where they covered some shame or timidity, 
never where they were masks for attacking an individual. The 
case of insincerity, above all others, which moved his bile, was 
where, out of some pretended homage to public decorurn, an 
individual was run down on account of any moral infirmities, 
such as we all have, or have had, or at least so easily and nat- 
urally may have had, thafnobody knows whether we have them 
or not. In such a case, and in this only almost. Lamb could be 
savage in his manner. I remember one instance, where rnany 
of the leading authors of our age were assembled — Coleridge, 
Wordsworth, Southey, etc.. Lamb was amongst them; and 

'vvhen was denounced as a man careless in the education 

of his children, and generally reputed to lead a licentious life — 
" Pretty fellows we are," said Lamb, '' to abuse him on that last 
score, when every one of us, I suppose, on going out this night 
into the Strand, will make up to the first pretty girl he sees." 
Some laughed — some looked grim — some looked grand — 
but Wordsworth, smiling, and yet with solemnity, said — "I 
hope, I trust, Mr. Lamb, you are mistaken, or, at least, you do 
not include us all in this sweeping judgment? " " Oh, as to 
that," said Lamb, "who knows? There's no telling: sad 
Josephs are some of us in this very room." Upon which every- 
body laughed, and Lamb amongst them; but he had been indig- 
nant and sincere in this rebuke of the hypocritical sacrifice to 
decorum. He manifested a fervour of feeling in such cases; not 
of anger primarily to the assailant — that was but a reaction ^ — 
his fervour was a movement of intense and conscientious justice 
towards the person assailed, as in one who felt that he himself 



2 54 I^E QUINCEY 

if not by the very same trespasses, had erred and was liable to 
err; that he also was a brother in human infirmity, and a 
debtor to the frailty of all flesh, though not possibly by the 
same overt acts or habits. 

In reviewing the life of Lamb, it is almost inevitable that, to 
a reader not specially acquainted with its events beyond what 
Serjeant Talfourd has judged it proper to communicate, many 
things will appear strange and unexplained. In a copy of the 
Serjeant's work, now lying before me, which had been bor- 
rowed for my use from a distinguished literary lady, I find a 
pencil mark of interrogation attached to the word " chequered," 
by which, at p. 334, Vol. II, Lamb's life is characterized. 
This is a natural expression of surprise, under the suppressions 
which have been here practised; suppressions dictated alike by 
delicacy for what is too closely personal, and by reverential pity 
for what is too ai^icting. Still it will be asked by those who 
read attentively, In what sense was Lamb's life chequered? As 
Wordsworth has scattered repeated allusions to this subject in 
his fine memorial verses on Lamb, allusions which must, for 
the present, be almost unintelligible to the great majority of 
readers; and, as he has done this, notwithstanding he was per- 
fectly aware at the time of the Serjeant's reserve, and aw^are also 
that this reserve was not accidental, professing himself, more- 
over, to be 

" Awed by the theme's peculiar sanctity, 
Which words less free," 

(viz. the prose narrative of Lamb's biographer, which wanted, 
of necessity, the impassioned tenderness of a poetic memorial), 

" Presumed not even to touch; " 

under these circumstances it may be right, whilst still persisting 
in not raising that veil which has been dropped over this sub- 
ject by Serjeant Talfourd, out of profound feelings for the 
surviving lady of the family, that sister of Charles Lamb, who 
presented so much of his own genius and his own disposition, 
through a softened or lunar reflection, and who was the great 
consoler of his afBiction — that sister, 

" The meek 
The self-restraining, and the ever kind, 
In whom his reason and intelHgent heart 
Found — for all interests, hopes, and tender cares, 
All softening, humanizing, hallowing powers, 
Whether withheld or for her sake unsought — 
More than sufficient recompense; " 



CHARLES LAMB 255 

Still persisting, I say, out of veneration for this admirable lady, 
in refusing to raise the veil, it may yet be lawful so far to assist 
the reader in penetrating its folds, as that he may apprehend 
the main features of the case, in a degree sufificient for the appli- 
cation of Wordsworth's else partly unintelligible verses; and 
the more so, for these two reasons : — First, That several pass- 
ages in these verses are calculated, at any rate, to pique the 
curiosity, although they do not satisfy it; Secondly, (which must 
especially be remembered), A mere interest of curiosity, 
curiosity vulgar and disrespectful, cannot be imagined in this 
case. A curiosity which put the question suggested by the 
word chequered, and absolutely challenged by Wordsworth's 
verses, must be already one that has been hallowed and refined 
by a tender interest in the subject; since no interest short of 
that could have attracted a reader to a life so poor in anec- 
dote, or any other vulgar allurements, or, at least, no other 
could have detained him sufficiently upon its circumstantial 
parts, to allow of his raising the question. 

To approach this question, therefore, in the most proper way, 
perhaps the very same verses of Wordsworth, which are 
amongst the parts of the Serjeant's book most fitted to suggest 
the question, are most fitted to suggest the answer. Being 
read carefully, without which they will do neither the one nor 
the other, they indicate their own commentary. One of the 
most beautiful passages, and, at the same time, of the most 
significant, is this : — 

" Thus, 'mid a shifting world, 
Did they together testify of time 
And season's difference — a double tree, 
With two collateral stems sprung from one root; 
Such were they — such through life they might have been, 
In union, in partition only such: 
Otherwise wrought the will of the Most High." 

They might have exhibited the image of a double tree, in 
union throughout their joint lives.* Diis aliter visum est. 
And then the poet goes on to shadow forth their real course 
through this world, and to hint at the sad cause which occa- 
sionally separated them, under the image of two ships 
launched jointly, and for the same voyage of discovery — view- 
ing each other, therefore, as partners pursuing common objects, 
under common hazards and difficulties — often divided by 
stress of weather, often rejoining each other at the fixed place 
of rendezvous, again to be separated, and again to be 
reunited : — 



256 DE QUINCEY 

" Yet, through all visitation and all trials, 
Still they were faithful — like two vessels launched 
From the same beach, one ocean to explore, 
With mutual help, and sailing to their league 
True as inexorable winds, or bars 
(Floating or fixed) of polar ice, allow." 

But there is another passage still more distinctly pointing 
the reader's attention to the recurring cause of separation : — 

" Ye were taught 
That the remembrance of foregone distress 
And the worst fear of future ill, (which oft 
Doth hang around it as a sickly child 
Upon its mother), may be both alike 
Disarmed of power to unsettle present good." 

This mysterious afBiction, therefore, of Lamb's life, m.aking 
that a " chequered " one, which else had been of a character too 
absolutely tranquil and monotonous — or ruffed, at least, only 
by internal irritations — was (as we learn from Wordsworth) 
of a nature to revolve upon him at intervals. One other pass- 
age — and this also from a poem of Wordsworth, but one 
written at the very least, thirty-two years ago, and having 
no reference at all to the Lambs — may furnish all the additional 
light which can be needed. It is one of the poems published 
in 1807, and many of them suggested by personal or local recol- 
lections, from a tour then recently performed through Scotland. 
The poet is speaking of a woman on the Borders, whose appear- 
ance and peculiar situation, in relation to a disabled husband, 
had caught his attention; and the expression of her eye is thus 
noticed : — 

" I looked and scanned her o'er and o'er — 
The more I looked, I wondered more; 
When suddenly I seemed to espy 
A trouble in her strong black eye — 
A remnant of uneasy light — 
A flash of something over-bright." 

Now, if the reader will ask himself what cause, apt to recur, 
in some cases, would be likely to leave these morbid appear- 
ances in the eye, this uneasy light, and these flashes that were 
over-bright — he will then apprehend, in silence and reveren- 
tial sympathy, what was that huge and steadfast affliction that 
beseiged, through life, the heart of Charles Lamb. 

If the reader will further understand that this affliction was 
not, as the heaviest afflictions oftentimes become, a mere remem- 
brance echoing from past times — possibly " a long since can- 
celled woe; " but that it was a two-headed snake, looking behind 



CHARLES LAMB 257 

and before, and gnawing at his heart by the double pangs of 
memory, and of anxiety, gloomy and fearful, watching for the 
future; and finally, that the object of this anxiety, who rnight at 
any moment be torn from his fireside, to return, after an interval 
of mutual suffering, (not to be measured, or even guessed at, 
but in the councils of God), was that Madonna-like lady, who, 
to him renewed the case described with such pathetic tenderness 
by the Homeric Andromache — being, in fact, his "all the 
world; " fulfiUing at once all offices of tenderness and duty; and 
making up to him, in her single character of sister, all that he 
had lost of maternal kindness — all that for her sake he had for- 
borne to seek of affections, conjugal or filial : — weighmg these 
accumulated circumstances of calamity, the feeling reader will 
be ready to admit that Lamb's cup of earthly sorrow was full 
enough, to excuse many more than he could be taxed with, of 
those half-crazy eccentricities in which a constant load of secret 
affliction (such, I mean, as must not be explained to the world) 
is apt to discharge itself. Hence, it might be, in part — but 
some have supposed from a similar, though weaker taint of the 
same constitutional malady — that Lamb himself discovered 
symptoms of irregular feeling or thinking, not such as could 
have been alarming in a general or neutral case, but in a subject 
known to be affected by these hereditary predispositions, were 
alarming, both to his friends, (those of them, at least, who had 
known the circumstances), and, with far heavier reason, to him- 
self. This also is, therefore, to be added to his afflictions — 
not merely the fear, constantly impending that his fireside (as 
I said before) might be rendered desolate, and that by a sudden 
blow, as well as for an indefinite duration; but also the fear (not 
equally strong, but equally impending forever) that he him- 
self, and all his splendid faculties, might, as by a flash of hght- 
ning, be swallowed up " in darkness infinite." ' 

Such was the condition of Charles Lamb, and such the tem- 
per that in part grew out of it — angelically benign, but also, 
in a morbid degree, melancholy — when I renewed my 
acquaintance with him in 1808-14; a period during which I 
learned to appreciate him better. Somewhere in this period 
it was, by the way, that I had an opportunity of introducing 
to his knowledge my brother, " poor Pink." Lamb liked him; 
and the more so, from an accident which occurred at the very 
second interview that he and Pink ever had. It was in Bond 
street, at an exhibition of two large and splendid pictures by 
Salvator Rosa; one representing a forest scene, and a forest 
recluse, (of what character, in Salvator's intention, may be 



258 r>E QUINCE Y 

doubted; but, in the little printed account of the paintings, he 
was described as Diogenes.) These pictures were, I should 
think, twelve feet high, at the least, consequently upon a large 
scale, and the tone of colouring was peculiarly sombre, or rather 
cold ; and it tended even to the monotonous ; one almost uniform 
cheerless tint of yellowish green, with some little perhaps of a 
warmish umber, overspread the distances ; and the foreground 
showed little else than a heavy dull-toned black. Pink, who 
knew as little of painting as the bow'sons of his various ships, 
had, however, a profound sensibility to some of its efifects ; and, 
if he ever ran up hastily and fearfully to London from Ports- 
mouth, it was sure to be at the time when the annual exhibi- 
tion of the Academy was open. No exhibition was ever 
missed by him, whether of a public or comparatively private 
nature. In particular, he had attended, with infinite deHght, 
the exhibition (in Newman Street, I think) of Mr. West's pic- 
tures. " Death and his Pale Horse " prodigiously attracted 
him; and others, from the freshness and gorgeousness of their 
colouring, had absolutely fascinated his eye. It may be 
imagined, therefore, with what disgust he viewed two subjects, 
from which the vast names of the painter had led him to expect 
so much, but which from the low style of the colouring yielded 
him so little. There might be forty people in the room at the 
time my brother and I were there. We had stood for ten or 
fifteen minutes, examining the pictures, when at length I noticed 
Charles Lamb, and, at a little distance, his sister. If a creditor 
had wished to seize upon either, no surer place in London (no, 
not Drury Lane, or Covent Garden) for finding them, than an 
exhibition from the works of the old masters. And, moreover, 
as amongst certain classes of birds, if you have one you are sure 
of the other, so with respect to the Lambs, (unless in those 
dreary seasons when the " dual unity " — as it is most affect- 
ingly termed by Wordsworth — had been for a time sundered 
into a widowed desolation, by the periodic affliction,) seeing 
or hearing the brother you knew that the sister could not be 
lar off. If she were, you sighed, knew what that meant, and 
asked no questions. 

Lamb, upon seeing us, advanced to shake hands; but he 
paused one moment to await the critical dogma which he per- 
ceived to be at that time issuing from Pink's lips. That it was 
vituperation in a high degree, anybody near us might hear; 
and some actually turned round in fright upon catching these 

profane words : " D the fellow ! I could do better 

myself." Wherewith, perhaps unconsciously, but perhaps also 



CHARLES LAMB 259 

by way of enforcing his thought, Pink, (who had brought home 
from his long sea Hfe a detestable practice of chewing tobacco) 
ejaculated a quid of some coarse quality, that lighted upon the 
frame of the great master's picture, and, for aught I know, may 
be sticking there yet. Lamb could not have approved such a 
judgment — nor perhaps the immeasurable presumption that 
might seem to have accompanied such a judgment from most 
men, or from an artist; but he knew that Pink was a mere 
sailor, knowing nothing historically of art, nor much of the 
pretensions of the mighty artists. Or, had it been otherwise — 
at all events, he admired and loved, beyond all other qualities 
whatsoever, a hearty, cordial sincerity: honest homely obsti- 
nacy, not to be enslaved by a great name — though that, again, 
may, by possibility, become in process of time itself an affec- 
tation—Lamb almost reverenced; and therefore it need not 
surprise anybody, that, in the midst of his loud, unrepressed 
laughter, he came up to my brother, and offered his hand, with 
an air of friendliness that flattered Pink, and a little misled him: 
for, that evening, on dining with Pink, he said to me — " That 
Lamb's a sensible fellow. You see how evidently he approved 
of what I remarked about that old humbugging rascal, Sal- 
vator Rosa." Lamb, in this point, had a feature of character 
in common with Sir Walter Scott (at least I suppose it to have 
been a feature of Sir Walter's mind, upon the information of 
Professor Wilson,) that, if a man had, or, if he supposed him to 
have, a strongly marked combination or tendency of feelings, 
of opinions, of likings, or of dislikings — what in fact, we call 
a character — no matter whether it were buih upon prejudices 
the most extravagant, or ignorance the most profound, pro- 
vided only it were sincere, and not mere lawless audacity, but 
were self-consistent, and had unity as respected itself — in that 
extent, he was sure to manifest liking and respect for the man. 
And hence it was, that Lamb liked Pink much more for this 
Gothic and outrageous sentence upon Salvator Rosa, than he 
would have liked him for the very best, profoundest, or most 
comprehensive critique upon that artist that could have been 
dehvered. Pink, on the other hand, liked Lamb greatly: and 
used, in all his letters, to request that I would present his best 
regards to that Charles Lamb " who wouldn't be humbugged 
by the old rascal in Bond Street." 

Thus I had gradually unlearned my false opinions, or out- 
worn my false impressions, about Lamb, by the year 1814. 
Indeed, by that time, I may say that I had learned to appreciate 
Lamb almost at his full value. And reason there was that I 



26o DE QUINCEY 

should. For, in that year, 1814, occurred a trial of Lamb's 
hold upon his friends' regard, which was a test case — a test for 
each side — since not every man could have mastered this 
offence; and far less could every man have merited that a man 
should master it. This was the year which closed the great 
war of wars, by its first frail close — the capture of Paris by the 
Allies. And of these Allies, all who had any personal weight 
or interest (the Austrian Emperor, who was, however, expected 
at one time, is no exception — for his weight was not personal 
but political) — all, I say, visited London and Oxford. I was 
at London during that glad tumultuous season. I witnessed 
the fervent joy — the triumph, too noble, too religious, to be 
boastful — the rapture of that great era. Coleridge, in the 
first edition of the '' Friend," has described the tempestuous joy 
of a people, habitually cold in relation to public events, upon 
occasion of a visit from their Sovereign's wife — the ill-fated 
Queen of Prussia; and this he does by way of illustrating the 
proposition which then occupies him — viz. the natural ten- 
dency of men to go beyond the demands of any event, whether 
personal or national, their inevitable tendency to transcend it 
by the quality and the amount of their enthusiasm. Now, the 
scenes then acting in London were, in two weighty respects, 
different. In the first place, the people — the audience and 
spectators — concerned, were a people as widely opposed to 
the Prussians in sensibility of a profound nature as it is pos- 
sible to imagine; the Prussians being really phlegmatic; and 
the British — as was many hundreds of times affirmed and (as 
far as the case admitted of proof) proved by the celebrated 
Walking Stewart, the profoundest of judges on this point — the 
British being, under the mask of a cold and reserved demean- 
our, the most impassioned of all nations : in fact, it requires but 
little philosophy to see, that, always, where the internal heat and 
power is greatest, there will the outside surface be the coldest; 
and the mere prima facie phenomenon of heat, spread over the 
external manner, (as in the French or Italian character, and 
somewhat in the Irish,) is at once an evidence that there is 
little concentration of it at the heart. The spectators, then, 
the audience, were different; and the spectacle — oh. Heavens! 
— how far it must have differed from any that can have been 
witnessed for many centuries ! Victors, victories, mere martial 
talents — were these the subjects of interest? 

No man, not Lamb himself, could rate at a lower price such 
national vanities as these, fitted only, as I think, to win a school- 
boy's sympathy. In fact, I have always entertained and 



CHARLES LAMB 26 1 

avowed a theory upon the question of mere miHtary talent, 
which goes far lower than anybody has yet gone, so far as I am 
aware ; for I have gone so far as to maintain this doctrine — 
that, if we could detach from the contemplation of a battle the 
awful interests oftentimes depending upon its issue — if, in 
fact, we could liberate our minds from the Hartleian law of 
association, and insulate the mere talent there operating — we 
should hold the art of fighting a battle to be as far below the 
art of fighting a game at chess, as the skill applicable to the 
former case is less sure of its effect and less perfect than the 
skill applicable to the latter. It is true there are other functions 
of a commander-in-chief, involving large knowledge of human 
nature, great energy in action, great decision of character, 
supreme moral courage, and, above all, that rarest species, which 
faces, without shrinking, civil responsibility. These qualities, 
in any eminent degree, are rare. But, confining one's view to 
the mere art of fighting a battle, I hold and insist upon it, that 
the military art is (intellectually speaking) a vulgar art, a 
mechanic art, a very limitary art; neither liberal in its nature, 
nor elevated (as some mechanic arts are) by the extensive 
range of its details. With such opinions, I am not a person to 
be confounded with mere John-Bull exulters in national 
prowess. Not as victories won by English bayonets or artil- 
lery, but as victories in a sublime strife of the good principle 
with the bad, I entered with all my heart into the fulness of the 
popular feeling: I rejoiced with the universal nation then 
rejoicing. There was the " nation of London " (as I have before 
called it) to begin with; there was also another nation almost, 
collected within the walls of London at that time. I rejoiced, 
as I have said : Lamb did not. Then I was vexed. 

Notes 

* I have, in another place, laid down what I conceive to be the true 
ground of distinction between genius and talent; which Hes mainly in 
this — that genius is intellectual power impregnated with the moral 
nature, and expresses a synthesis of the active in man with his 
original organic capacity of pleasure and pain. Hence the very word 
genius, because the genial nature in its whole organization is 
expressed and involved in it. Hence, also, arises the reason that 
genius is always peculiar and individual; one man's genius never 
exactly repeats another man's. But talent is the same in all men; 
and that which is effected by talent, can never serve to identify 
or indicate its author. Hence, too, that, although talent is the object 
of respect, it never conciliates love; you love a man of talent perhaps 
in concreto, but not talent, whereas genius, even for itself is idolized. 
I am the more proud of this distinction, since I have seen the utter 
failure of Mr. Coleridge, judging from his attempt in his " Table Talk." 

* " Rob me thy father's exchequer."— Falstaff, in Henry IV, Part i. 



262 DE QUINCEY 

" One feature there was in Lamb's chanty, which is but too fre- 
quently found wanting amongst the most Hberal and large-hearted of 
the charitable, and especially where the natural temper is melancholy 
or desponding; one, moreover, which, beyond any other aspect ot 
charity, wears a winning grace — one, finally, which is indistinctly 
pointed out as a duty in our scriptural code of ethics — the habit of 
hoping cheerfully and kindly on behalf of those who were otherwise 
objects of moral blame. Lamb, if anybody, plagued as he was by a 
constitutional taint of morbid melancholy, might have been privileged 
to fail in this duty; but he did not. His goodness, making it too painful 
to him to cherish as final conclusions any opinions with regard to any 
individual which seemed to shut him out from the sympathy or the 
brotherly feeling of the just and good, overpowered the acuteness of 
his discernment; and where it was quite impossible to find matter 
of approbation in the past or the present conduct, he would turn to the 
future for encouraging views of amendment, and would insist upon 
regarding what was past, as the accidental irregularity, the anomaly, 
the exception, warranting no inferences with regard to what remained; 
and (whenever that was possible) would charge it all upon unfortunate 
circumstances. Everybody must have felt the profound pathos of 
that passage in scripture — "Let him that stole, steal no more;" a 
pathos which rests evidently upon the sudden substitution for a judicial 
sentence proportioned to the offence, (such as an ordinary lawgiver 
would have uttered, and such as the listener anticipates), of a heavenly 
light opened upon the guilty heart, showing to it a hope and an escape, 
and whispering that for itself also there may be final peace in reversion, 
where otherwise all had seemed blank despair and the darkness of 
coming vengeance. The poor benighted Pariah of social life — who 
durst not so much as lift up his eyes to heaven, and, by the angry 
tone of human laws, as well as of society in general, finds but too 
much that disposes him to despond, and perhaps makes no effort, 
merely because all efforts seem likely to be unavailing — will often, 
in the simple utterance of a cheerful hope on his behalf, see as it were 
a window opening in heaven, and faces radiant with promise looking 
out upon him. These words I mean to apply as the distinguishing 
description of Christian ethics, as contrasted with all other .ethical 
theories. For it is a just inquiry with respect to any system of 
morals — not merely. What are your substantial doctrines, what is the 
corpus of your laws? — but also. What is your preparatory disci- 
pline? — what are the means at your disposal for winning over the 
reluctant disciple, the bold recusant, or the timid doubter? And it is 
worthy of remark that, in this case of hoping on behalf of those who 
did seem no just objects of hope — the very same absence of all 
compromise with human infirmity is found, which a distinguished 
German infidel described as the great distinction of Christianity, and 
one which raised it prima facie above all other codes of morality. 
There is indeed a descent — a condescension to humanity and its weak- 
ness; but no shadow of a compromise — a capitulation — or what in 
Roman law is called a " transaction " with it. " For," said Immanuel 
Kant, "here lies the point : — the Stoic maintains the moral principle in its 
ideal purity ; he sacrifices nothing at all to human weakness ; and so far he 
deserves praise. But then, for that same reason, he is useless; his stand- 
ard is exalted beyond all human reproach. On the other hand, the 
Epicurean relaxes so far as to make his method of 'holiness' attainable. 
But how? It is by debasing and lowering the standard. Each, there- 



CHARLES LAMB 263 

fore, in a different sense, and for different reasons, is useless to human 
nature as it is. Now comes Christianity, and effects a synthesis of all 
which is good in each, while she purifies herself from all tamt of what 
is evil She presents a standard of holiness a ' maximum perfectionis, 
(as the sch6lastic phrase is), no less exalted, no less jealous of all 
earthly taint or soil, than Stoicism. This, however, she makes acces- 
sible to man; not by any compromise or adaptation of its demands to 
a lower nature; but by means peculiarly her own — by promise of 
supernatural aid. Thus she is celestial like the one, and terrestrial 
like the other, but by such a reconciliation as celestial means only 
could effect." This Kant allowed to constitute a philosophic character 
for Christianity, which offered itself at the very vestibule. And in this 
function of hope, as one which is foremost amongst the functions ol 
charity, there is the very same harmony of rigor in the judge, and 
loyalty to the standard erected, with human condescension and con- 
sideration for the criminal. . 

* There is, however, an obscurity in the expression at this point of 
the verses; it lies partly in the word such. The only construction 
of the verses in harmony with the words, seems the following: They 
might have appeared as a double tree, etc., whether viewed in those 
circumstances which united them — viz. in the features of resem- 
blance — or viewed in those of difference, as sex and its moral results 
which made the partition between them. Such they might have 
seemed; but calamity wrought a more perfect division between them, 
under which, they seemer no longer one, but two distinct trees. 

""The angel ended his mysterious rite; 

And the pure vision closed in darkness infinite." 



n 

IT was summer. The earth groaned under foHage and 
flowers — fruits I was going to say, but, as yet, fruits were 
not — and the heart of man under the burden of triumph- 
ant gratitude: man, I say; for surely to man, and not to 
England only, belonged the glory and the harvest of that 
unequalled triumph/ Triumph, however, in the sense of mili- 
tary triumph, was lost and swallowed up in the vast overthrow 
of evil, and of the evil principle. All nations sympathized with 
England — with England, as the centre of this great resurrec- 
tion; centre for the power; centre, most of all, for the moral 
principle at work. It was, in fact, on that ground, and because 
all Europe felt and acknowledged that England had put a soul 
into the resistance to Napoleon, wherever and in whatever 
corner manifested — therefore it was that now the crowned 
heads of Europe, "with all their peerage," paid a visit to this 
marvellous England. It was a distinct act of homage from all 
the thrones of Europe, now present on our shores, actually, or 
by representation. Certain it is, that these royal visits to Eng- 
land had no other ground than the astonishment felt for the 
moral grandeur of the country which only, amongst all coun- 
tries, had yielded nothing to fear — nothing to despondency; 
and also the astonishment felt, at any rate, by those incapable 
of higher emotions, for its enormous resources, which had 
been found adequate to the support, not only of its own colossal 
exertions, but of those made by almost half of Christendom 
besides. Never before in this world was there so large a con- 
gress of princes and illustrious leaders, attracted together by 
the mere force of unwilling, and, in some instances, jealous 
admiration. I was in London during that fervent carnival of 
national enthusiasm; and naturally, though no seeker of spec- 
tacles, I saw — for nobody who walked the streets of western 
London could avoid seeing — the chief objects of public inter- 
est. I was passing from Hyde Park along Piccadilly, on the 
day when the Emperor of Russia was expected. Many scores 
of thousands had gone out of London over Blackfriars' Bridge, 
expressly to meet him, on the understanding that he was to 
make his approach by that route. At the moment when I 

264 



CHARLES LAMB 265 

reached the steps of the Pulteney Hotel, a single carriage of 
plain appearance, followed by two clumsy, Cossack small-lan- 
daus, (or rather what used to be called sociables,) approached 
at a rapid pace: so rapid, that I had not time to pass before the 
waiters of the hotel had formed a line across the foot-pavement, 
intercepting the passing. In a moment, a cry arose — " The 
Czar! the Czar!'^ — and before I could count six, I found 
myself in a crowd. The carriage door was opened, the steps let 
down, and one gentleman, unattended, stepped out. His pur- 
pose was to have passed through the avenue formed for him, 
in so rapid a way as to prevent any recognition of his person; 
but the cry in the street, the huzzas, and the trampling crowd, 
had brought to a front window on the drawing-room story a 
lady whom I had seen often before, and knew to be the 
Duchess of Oldenburg, the Emperor's sister. Her white dress 
caught the traveller's eye; and he stopped to kiss his hand to 
her. This action and attitude gave us all an admirable oppor- 
tunity for scanning his features and whole personal appearance. 
There was nothing about it to impress one very favourably. 
His younger brother, the present Emperor, is described by all 
those who saw him, when travelling in Great Britain, as a man 
of dignified and impressive exterior. Not so with the Emperor 
Alexander; he was tall, an'd seemed likely to become corpulent 
as he advanced in life, (at that time he was not above thirty- 
seven;) and in his figure there seemed nothing particularly 
amiss. His dress, however, was unfortunate; it was a green 
surtout: now, it may be remarked, that men rarely assume this 
colour who have not something French in their taste. His was 
so in all things, as might be expected from his French educa- 
tion under the literary fribble. Monsieur La Harpe. 

But, waiving his appearance in other respects, what instantly 
repelled all thoughts of an imperial presence, was his unfor- 
tunate face. It was a face wearing a northern fairness, and 
not perhaps tmamiable in its expression; but it was overladen 
with flesh, and expressed nothing at all; or, if anything, good 
humour, good nature, and considerable self-complacency. In 
fact, the only prominent feature in the Czar's disposition was, 
an amiable, somewhat sentimental ostentation — amiable, I say, 
for it was not connected with a gloomy pride or repulsive arro- 
gance, but with a blind and winning vanity. And this cast of 
character was so far fortunate, as it supplied impulses to exer- 
tion, and irritated into activity a weak mind, that would else, by 
its natural tendencies, have sunk into torpor. His extensive 
travels, however, were judiciously fitted for rescuing him from 



266 DE QUINCEY 

that curse of splendid courts; and his greatest enemy had also 
been his greatest benefactor, though unintentionally, through 
the tempestuous agitations of the Russian mind, and of Rus- 
sian society, in all its strata, during that most portentous of all 
romances — not excepting any of the crusades, or the adven- 
turous expeditions of Cortez and Pizarro, still less the Parthian 
invasions of Crassus or of Julian — viz. the anabasis of 
Napoleon. There can be no doubt, to any reflecting mind, 
that the happiest part of his reign, even to Charles I, was that 
which was also, in a political sense, the period of his misfor- 
tunes — viz. the seven years between 1 641 and 1649; three of 
which were occupied in stormy but adventurous war; and the 
other four in romantic journeys, escapes, and attempts at 
escape, checkered, doubtless, with trepidations and anxieties, 
hope and fear, grief and exultation, which, however much 
tainted with distress, still threw him upon his own resources of 
every kind, bodily not less than moral and intellectual, which 
else the lethargy of a court would have left undeveloped and 
unsuspected even by himself. Such also had been the quality 
of the Russian Emperor's experience for some of his later years ; 
and such, probably, had been the result of his own compara- 
tive happiness. Yet it was said, that, about this time, the 
peace of Alexander's mind was beginning to give way. It is 
well known that a Russian emperor, lord of sixty million lives, 
is no lord of his own, not at any time. He sleeps always in the 
bosom of danger, secret, unfathomable, invisible. It is the 
inevitable condition of despotism and autocracy that he should 
do so. And the Russian Czar is, as to security, pretty nearly 
in the situation of the Roman Caesar. 

He, however, who is always and consciously in danger, may 
be supposed to become partially reconciled to it. But, be that 
as it may, it was supposed that, at this time, Alexander became 
aware of some special conspiracies that were ripening at home 
against his own person. It was rumoured that, just about this 
time, in the very centre of exuberant jubilations, ascending 
from every people in Europe, he lost his serenity and cheerful 
temper. On this one occasion, in the moment of rejoining a 
sister, whom he was said to love with peculiar tenderness, he 
certainly looked happy; but, on several subsequent opportuni- 
ties that I had of seeing him, he looked much otherwise; dis- 
turbed and thoughtful, and as if seeking to banish alarming 
images, by excess of turbulent gayety, by dancing, or by any 
mode of distraction. Under this influence it was also, or was 
supposed to be, that he manifested unusual interest in religious 



CHARLES LAMB 267 

speculations; diverting to these subjects, especially to those 
of a quietist character, (such as the doctrines of the English 
Quakers,) that enthusiasm which hitherto, for several years, 
he had dedicated to military studies and pursuits. Meantime, 
the most interesting feature belonging to the martial equipage 
which he drew after him, was the multitude of Tartar or other 
Asiatic objects, men, carriages, etc., prevailing in the crowd, 
and suggesting the enormous magnitude of the empire from 
whose remote provinces they came. There were also the 
European Tartars, the Cossacks, with their Hetman Platofif. 
He had his abode somewhere to the north of Oxford Street; 
and further illustrated the imperial grandeur, being himself a 
sovereign prince, and yet a vassal when he found himself in 
the presence of Alexander. This prince, who (as is well 
known) loved and honoured the English, as he afterwards tes- 
tified by the most princely welcome to all of that nation who 
visited his territories, was, on his part, equally a favourite with 
the English. He had lost his gallant son in a cavalry skir- 
mish ; and his spirits had been much depressed by that calamity. 
But he so far commanded himself as to make his private feel- 
ings give way to his public enthusiasm ; and he never withdrew 
himself from the clamourous applause of the mob, in which he 
took an undisguised pleaslire. This was the man, amongst all 
the public visitors now claiming the hospitality of the English 
Regent, whom Lamb saw and talked of with most pleasure. 
His sublime ugliness was most delectable to him; and the 
Tartar propensities, some of which had been perhaps exagger- 
ated by the newspapers, (such for instance, as their drinking the 
oil out of the street lamps,) furnished him with a constant feu- 
de-joie of jests and playful fictions, at the expense of the Het- 
man ; and in that way it was that he chiefly expressed his sym- 
pathy with this great festal display. 

Marshal Blucher, who still more powerfully converged upon 
himself the interest of the public, was lodged in a little quad- 
rangle of St. James's Palace, (that to the right of the clock- 
tower entrance.) So imperious and exacting was the general 
curiosity to see the features of the old soldier — this Marshal 
" Forwards," as he was always called in Germany, and who had 
exhibited the greater merit of an Abdiel fidelity, on occasion 
of the mighty day of Jena, — that the court was filled from an 
early hour of every morning, until a late dinner-hour, with a 
mob of all ranks, calling for him by his name, tout court, 
" Blucher! Blucher! " At short intervals, no longer in general 
than five minutes, the old warrior obeyed the summons 



268 DE QUINCEY 

throughout the day, unless when he was known to be absent on 
some pubHc occasion. His slavery must have been most 
wearisome to his feelings. But he submitted with the utmost 
good nature, and allowed cheerfully for the enthusiasm which 
did so much honour to himself and to his country. In fact, this 
enthusiasm, on his first arrival in London, showed itself in a 
way that astonished everybody, and was half calculated to 
alarm a stranger. He had directed the postilion to proceed 
straightway to Carlton House — his purpose being to present 
his duty in person to the Regent, before he rested upon Eng- 
lish ground. This was his way of expressing his homage to 
the British nation, for upholding, through all fortunes, that 
sacred cause of which he also had never despaired. Moreover, 
his hatred of France, and the very name French, was so intense, 
that upon that title also he cherished an ancient love towards 
England. As the carriage passed through the gateway of the 
Horse-Guards, the crowd, which had discovered him, became 
enormous. When the garden or Park entrance to the palace 
was thrown open, to admit Blucher, the vast mob, for the first 
and the last time, carried the entrance as if by storm. All oppo- 
sition from the porters, the police, the soldiers on duty, was 
vain; and many thousands of people accompanied the veteran 
prince, literally " hustling " his carriage, and, in a manner carry- 
ing him in their arms to the steps of the palace door; on the 
top of which, waiting to receive him, stood the English Regent. 
The Regent himself smiled graciously and approvingly upon 
this outrage, which, on any minor occasion, would have struck 
him with consternation, perhaps, as well as disgust. 

Lamb, I believe, as well as myself, witnessed part of this 
scene; which was the most emphatic exhibition of an uncon- 
trollable impulse — a perfect rapture of joy and exultation, 
possessing a vast multitude with entire unity of feeling, that I 
have ever witnessed, excepting, indeed, once besides, and that 
was a scene of the very same kind, or rather a reflection of the 
same scene.- It occurred in Hyde Park, on the following Sun- 
day: Prince Blucher and his master, the King of Prussia; the 
Hetman of the Cossacks, with his master, the Czar; the Duke 
of Wellington, with some of the royal Dukes, and a vast cor- 
tege of civil and military dignities — in short, the elite of all 
the great names that had grown into distinction in the late 
wonderful campaigns — German, Spanish, French — rode into 
the Park, simultaneously. If there had been any division of 
their several suites and parties, this had vanished; and all were 
thrown into one splendid confusion, under a summer sun. 



CHARLES LAMB 269 

The park was, of course, floating with a sea of human heads. 
And, in particular, there was a dense mass of horsemen, 
amounting to six thousand at least, (as I was told by a 
person accustomed to compute crowds,) following close in the 
rear. The van of this mighty body, composed of so many 
" princedoms, dominations, virtues, powers," directed their 
course to Kensington Gardens — into these, as privileged 
guests, they were admitted — precautions, founded on the 
Carlton House experience, having been taken to exclude the 
ignobile vulgus who followed. The impulse, however, of the 
occasion, was too mighty for the case. The spectacle was 
absolutely sublime — of hurricane, instantaneous power, sweep- 
ing away, like an Alpine lake broken loose, all barriers almost 
before they were seen. The six thousand horsemen charged 
into the gardens; that being (as in the other case) the first and 
also the last intrusion of the kind. 

One thing in this popular festival of rejoicing was peculiarly 
pleasing to myself and to many others — the proof that was 
thus afiforded to so many eminent foreigners of our liberality, 
and total freedom from a narrow or ungenerous nationality. 
This is a grave theme, and one which, on account of the vast 
superstructure reared upon it, of calumnious insult to our 
national character, requires a separate discussion. Here it 
may be sufficient to say, that Marshal "Blucher, at least, could 
have no reason to think us an arrogant people, or narrow in our 
national sensibilities to merit, wherever found. He could not 
but know that we had also great military names to show — one 
or two greater than his own; for, in reality, his qualities were 
those of a mere fighting captain, with no great reach of capacity, 
and of slender accomplishments. Yet we — that is to say, even 
the street mob of London — glorified him as much as ever they 
did Lord Nelson, and more than they ever did the Duke of 
WelHngton. In this crowd, on this memorable Sunday, by- 
the-by, rode Prince Leopold of Saxe Coburg, as yet obscure 
and poor, (not having £300 a year,) and seeing neither his future 
prosperity, nor its sudden blight, nor its resurrection. There 
also rode the Prince of Orange, and many another, who was 
to reap laurels in the coming year, but was yet dreaming not of 
Waterloo as a possibility. With respect to Blucher, however, 
it is painful to know that he, who was now so agreeably con- 
vinced of our national generosity, came afterwards to show 
that jealousy of us which we had so loudly refused to feel of 
him, through the mere mortifications practised on his self- 
esteem, perhaps maliciously, by the French authorities, in pass- 



270 DE QUINCEY 

ing by himself and addressing their applications to the Duke of 
Wellington. 

Fouche, Chaboulon de la Ratre, and other writers, have 
recorded the maniacal rage of Prince Blucher, when despatches 
from Paris passed through his camp — nay, were forwarded 
to his head-quarters, in order to gain — what? Audience from 
him? No. Sanction from him? No. Merely a countersign, 
or a passport for the messenger; some purely ministerial act of 
participation in the transit of the courier; the despatches being 
uniformly for the Duke of Wellington. This, on the part of 
the French authorities, must have been, in some respects, a 
malicious act. Doubtless, the English general was known only 
in the character of a victor; whereas Blucher (and that the old 
testy hussar should have remembered) had never been known 
at Paris, for anything but defeats; and, within the week pre- 
ceding, for a signal defeat, which many think might have been 
ripened into a smashing overthrow. But, still, there can be 
no doubt that deadly malice towards the Prussian name was 
the true ground of the act; for the Parisians bore (and still 
bear) a hatred to the Prussians, absolutely irrational and inex- 
plicable. The battle of Rosbach can hardly have been the rea- 
son, still less the Prussian resumption of the trophies then 
gathered from France, and subsequently carried off by 
Napoleon ; for, as yet, they had not been resumed. The ground 
of this hatred must have lain in the famous manifesto of the 
Duke of Brunswick — for he, as a servant of the Prussian 
throne, and commanding a Prussian army, was looked upon 
as a Prussian. This change, however, in Blucher — this jeal- 
ousy of England, within so short a time — astonished and 
grieved all who had seen him amongst ourselves. Many a 
time I met him in the street; four or five times in streets where 
he could not have been looked for — the streets of the city ; and 
always with a retinue of applauders, that spread like wildfire. 
Once only he seemed to have a chance for passing incognito. 
It was in Cheapside. He was riding, as he generally was, in 
the open carriage (on this occasion a curricle) of some gentle- 
man with whom he was going to dine, at a villa near London. 
A brewer's wagon stopped the way for two minutes; in that 
space of time, twenty people crowded about who knew his 
features: " Blucher! Blucher! " resounded through the street in 
a moment ; an uproar rose to heaven ; and the old Marshal's face 
relaxed from its gravity, or its sternness, (though, to say the 
truth, there was little of determinate expression in his features; 
and, if he had not been so memorable a person, one would have 



CHARLES LAMB 27 I 

thought him a mere snuffy old German) — relaxing, however, 
from his habitual tom-cat gravity, he looked gracious and 
benign. Then, at least, he loved us English; then he had rea- 
son to love us ; for we made a pet of him ; and a pet in a cause 
which would yet make his bones stir in the grave — in the 
national cause of Prussia against France. I have often won- 
dered that he did not go mad with the fumes of gratified ven- 
geance. Revenge is a luxury, to those who can rejoice in it at 
all, so inebriating that possibly a man would be equally liable to 
madness, from the perfect gratification of his vindictive hatred 
or its perfect defeat. And, hence, it may have been that 
Blucher did not go mad. Few men have had so ample a ven- 
geance as he, when holding Paris as a conqueror; and yet, 
because he was but one of several who so held it, and because 
he was prevented from mining and blowing up the bridge of 
Jena, in that way, perhaps, the delirium of his vengeance 
became less intoxicating. 

Now, returning to Lamb, I may remark that, at this memor- 
able season, his wayward nature showed itseH more conspicu- 
ously than ever. One might have thought that, if he mani- 
fested no sympathy in a direct shape with the primary cause 
of the public emotion, still he would have sympathized, in a 
secondary way, with the delirious joy which every street, every 
alley, then manifested, to the ear as well as to the eye. But no! 
Still, like Diogenes, he threw upon us all a scoffing air, as of 
one who stands upon a pedestal of eternity, looking down upon 
those who share in the transitory feelings of their own age. 
How he felt in the following year, when the mighty drama was 
consummated by Waterloo, I cannot say, for I was not then in 
London: I guess, however, that he would have manifested 
pretty much the same cynical contempt for us children of the 
time, that he did in all former cases. 

Not until 1 82 1, and again in 1823, did I come to know 
Charles Lamb thoroughly. Politics, national enthusiasm, had 
then gone to sleep. I had come up to London in a case con- 
nected with my own private interest. In the same spirit of 
frankness that I have shown on other occasions in these per- 
sonal sketches, I shall here not scruple to mention, that certain 
pecuniary embarrassments had rendered it necessary that I 
should extricate myself by literary toils. I was ill at that time, 
and for years after — ill from the effects of opium upon the 
liver; and one primary indication of any illness felt in that 
organ, is peculiar depression of spirits. Hence arose a singu- 
lar effect of reciprocal action, in maintaining a state of dejection. 



272 DE QUINCEY 

From the original physical depression caused by the derange- 
ment of the Hver, arose a sympathetic depression of the mind, 
disposing me to believe that I never could extricate myself; and 
from this belief arose, by reaction, a thousand-fold increase of 
the physical depression. I began to view my unhappy Lon- 
don life — a life of literary toils, odious to my heart — as a 
permanent state of exile from my Westmoreland home. My 
three eldest children, at that time in the most interesting stages 
of childhood and infancy, were in Westmoreland ; and so power- 
ful was my feeling (derived merely from a deranged liver) of 
some long, never-ending separation from my family, that at 
length, in pure weakness of mind, I was obliged to relinquish my 
daily walks in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, from the 
misery of seeing children in multitudes, that too forcibly recalled 
my own. The picture of " Fox-ghyll," my Westmoreland 
abode, and the solitary fells about it, upon which those were 
roaming whom I could not see, was for ever before my eyes. 
And it must be remembered that distance — the mere amount 
of distance — has much to do in such a case. You are equally 
divided from those you love, it is very true, by one hundred 
miles. But that, being a space which in England we often 
traverse in eight or ten hours, even without the benefit of rail- 
roads, has come to seem nothing at all. " Fox-ghyll," on the 
other hand, was two hundred and eighty miles distant; and 
from the obstacles at the latter end of the journey, (cross-roads 
and interruptions of all public communications,) it seemed 
twice as long. 

Meantime, it is very true that the labours I had to face would 
not, even to myself, in a state of good bodily health; have 
appeared alarming. Myself, I say — for, in any state of health, 
I do not write with rapidity. * Under the influence of opium, 
however, when it reaches its maximum in diseasing the liver 
and deranging the digestive functions, all exertion whatever is 
revolting in excess; intellectual exertion, above all, is connected 
habitually, when performed under opium influence, with a sense 
of disgust the most profound for the subject (no matter what) 
which detains the thoughts; all that morning freshness of ani- 
mal spirits, which, under ordinary circumstances, consumes, as 
it were, and swallows up the interval between one's self and 
one's distant object, (consumes, that is, in the same sense as 
Virgil describes a high-blooded horse on the fret for starting, 
as traversing the ground with his eye, and devouring the dis- 
tance in fancy before it is approached) — all that dewy fresh- 
ness is exhaled and burnt off by the parching effects of opium 



CHARLES LAMB 273 

on the animal economy. You feel like one of Swift's Strul- 
brngs, prematurely exhausted of life ; and molehills are inevi- 
tably exaggerated by the feelings into mountains. Not that it 
was molehills exactly which I had then to surmount — they 
were moderate hills ; but that made it all the worse in the result, 
since my judgment could not altogether refuse to go along 
with my feelings. I was, besides, and had been for some time, 
engaged in the task of unthreading the labyrinth by which I 
had reached, unawares, my present state of slavery to opium. 
I was descending the mighty ladder, stretching to the clouds 
as it seemed, by which I had imperceptibly attained my giddy 
altitude — that point from which it had seemed equally impos- 
sible to go forward or backward. To wean myself from 
opium, I had resolved inexorably ; and finally I accomplished 
my vow. But the transition state was the worst state of all 
to support. All the pains of martyrdom were there: all the 
ravages in the economy of the great central organ, the stom- 
ach, which had been wrought by opium; the sickening dis- 
gust which attended each separate respiration ; and the rooted 
depravation of the appetite and the digestion — all these must 
be weathered for months upon months, and without the stimu- 
lus (however false and treacherous) which, for some part of 
each day, the old doses of laudanum would have supplied. 
These doses were to be continually diminished ; and, under this 
difficult dilemma — if, as some people advised, the diminution 
were made by so trifling a quantity as to be imperceptible 
— in that case, the duration of the process was interminable 
and hopeless. Thirty years would not have sufficed to carry 
it through. On the other hand, if twenty-five to fifty drops 
were withdrawn on each day, (that is, from one to two grains 
of opium,) inevitably within three, four, or five days, the deduc- 
tion began to tell grievously ; and the effect was, to restore the 
craving for opium more keenly than ever. There was the col- 
lision of both evils — that from the laudanum, and that from 
the want of laudanum. The last was a state of distress per- 
petually increasing, the other was one which did not sensibly 
diminish-— no, not for a long period of months. Irregular 
motions, impressed by a potent agent upon the blood or other 
processes of life, are slow to subside ; they maintain themselves 
long after the exciting cause has been partially or even wholly 
withdrawn ; and, in my case, they did not perfectly subside into 
the motion of tranquil health, for several years. 

From all this it will be easy to understand the fact— though, 
after all, impossible, without a similar experience, to under- 
18 



274 ^^ QUINCEY 

stand the amount — of my suffering- and despondency in the 
daily task upon which circumstances had thrown me at this 
period — the task of writing and producing something for the 
journals, invita Minerva. Over and above the principal opera- 
tion of my suffering state, as felt in the enormous difficulty 
with which it loaded every act of exertion, there was another 
secondary effect which always followed as a reaction from the 
first. And that this was no accident or peculiarity attached to 
my individual temperament, I may presume from the circum- 
stance, that Mr. Coleridge experienced the very same sensa- 
tions, in the same situation, throughout his literary life, and 
has often noticed it to me with surprise and vexation. The 
sensation was that of powerful disgust with any subject upon 
which he had occupied his thoughts, or had exerted his powers 
of composition for any length of time, and an equal disgust 
with the result of his exertions — powerful abhorrence I may 
call it, absolute loathing, of all that he had produced. In Mr. 
Coleridge's case, speaking at least of the time from 1807 to 
181 5, this effect was a most unhappy one; as it tended to check 
or even to suppress his attempts at writing for the press, in a 
degree which cannot but have been very injurious for all of 
us who wished to benefit by his original intellect, then in the 
very pomp of its vigour. This effect was, indeed, more exten- 
sive than with myself: with Coleridge, even talking upon a 
subject, and throwing out his thoughts upon it liberally and 
generally, was an insurmountable bar to writing upon it with 
effect. In the same proportion in which he had been felicitous 
as a talker, did he come to loathe and recoil from the subject 
ever afterwards; or, at least, so long as any impressions 
remained behind of his own display. And so far did this go — 
so uniformly, and so notoriously to those about him — that 
Miss Hutchinson, a young lady in those days whom Cole- 
ridge greatly admired and loved as a sister, submitted at times 
to the trouble of taking down what fell from his lips, in the 
hope that it might serve as materials to be worked up at some 
future period, when the disgust should have subsided, or per- 
haps in spite of that disgust, when he should see the topics and 
their illustrations all collected for him, without the painful 
effort of recovering them by calling up loathsome trains of 
thought. It was even suggested, and at one time (I believe) 
formally proposed, by some of Coleridge's friends, that, to save 
from perishing the overflowing opulence of golden thoughts 
continually welling up and flowing to waste in the course of his 
ordinary conversation, some short-hand writer, having the 



CHARLES LAMB 275 

suitable accomplishments of a learned education and habits of 
study, should be introduced as a domestic companion. But 
the scheme was dropped; perhaps from the feeling, in Cole- 
ridge himself, that he would not command his usual felicity, or 
his natural power of thought, under the consciousness of an 
echo sitting by his side, and repeating to the world all the half- 
developed thoughts or half-expressed suggestions which he 
might happen to throw out. In the meantime, for the want of 
some such attendant, certain it is, that many valuable papers 
perished. 

In 1810, " The Friend " was in a course of publication by 
single sheets of sixteen pages. These, by the terms of the pros- 
pectus, should have appeared weekly. But if, at any time, it 
happened that Wordsworth, or anybody else interested in the 
theme, came into Coleridge's study whilst he was commencing 
his periodical lucubrations, and, naturally enough led him into 
an oral disquisition upon it, then perished all chance for that 
week's fulfilment of the contract. Miss Hutchinson, who was 
aware of this, did her best to throw hindrances in the way of 
this catastrophe, but too often ineffectually: and, accordingly, 
to this cause, as a principal one amongst others, may be 
ascribed the very irregular intervals between the several num- 
bers of " The Friend " in its 'first edition ; and to this, also, per- 
haps, the abrupt termination of the whole at the twenty-ninth 
number. In after years, Coleridge assured me, that he never 
could read anything he had written without a sense of over- 
powering disgust. Reverting to my own case, which was 
pretty nearly the same as his, there was, however, this dififer- 
ence — that, at times, when I had slept at more regular hours 
for several nights consecutively, and had armed myself by a 
sudden increase of the opium for a few days running, I recov- 
ered, at times, a remarkable glow of jovial spirits. In some 
such artificial respites, it was, from my usual state of distress, 
and purchased at a heavy price of subsequent suffering, that 
I wrote the greater part of the " Opium Confessions " in the 
autumn of 1821. The introductory part, (i. e. the narrative 
part,) written for the double purpose of creating an interest in 
what followed, and of making it intelligible, since, without this 
narration, the dreams (which were the real object of the whole 
work) would have had no meaning, but would have been mere 
incoherencies — this narrative part was written with singular 
rapidity. The rest might be said to have occupied an unusual 
length of time ; since, though the mere penmanship might have 
been performed within moderate limits, (and in fact under some 



276 DE QUINCE Y 

pressure from the printer,) the dreams had been composed 
slowly, and by separate efforts of thought, at wide intervals of 
time, according to the accidental prevalence, at any particular 
time, of the separate elements of such dream in my own real 
.dream-experience. These circumstances I mention to account 
for my having written anything in a happy or genial state of 
mind, when I was in a general state so opposite, by my own 
description, to everything like enjoyment. That description 
as a general one, states most truly the unhappy condition, and 
the somewhat extraordinary condition of feeling, to which 
opium had brought me. I, like Mr. Coleridge, could not 
endure what I had written for some time after I had written it. 
I also shrank from treating any subject which I had much 
considered; but more, I believe, as recoiling from the intricacy 
and the elaborateness which had been made known to me in the 
course of considering it, and on account of the difficulty or the 
toilsomeness, which might be fairly presumed from the mere 
fact that I had long considered it, or could have found it neces- 
sary to do so, than from any blind mechanical feeling inevitably 
associated (as in Coleridge it was) with a second survey of the 
same subject. 

One other effect there was from the opium, and I believe it 
had some place in Coleridge's list of morbid affections caused 
by opium, and of disturbances extended even to the intellect — 
which was, that the judgment was for a time grievously 
impaired, sometimes even totally abolished, as applied to any- 
thing which I had recently written. Fresh from the labour of 
composition, I believe, indeed, that almost every man, unless he 
'has had a very long and close experience in the practice of 
writing, finds himself a little dazzled and bewildered in com- 
puting the effect, as it will appear to neutral eyes, of what he 
has produced. This result, from the hurry and effort of com- 
position, doubtless we all experience, or at some time have 
experienced. But the incapacitation which I speak of here, as 
due to opium, is of another kind and another degree. It is 
mere childish helplessness, or senile paralysis, of the judgment, 
which distresses the man in attempting to grasp the upshot and 
the total effect (the tout ensemble) of what he has himself so 
recently produced. There is the same imbecility in attempt- 
ing to hold things steadily together, and to bring them under 
a comprehensive or unifying act of the judging faculty, as 
there is in the efforts of a drunken man to follow a chain of 
reasoning. Opium is said to have some specific effect of debili- 
tation upon the memory ; ' that is, not merely the general one 



CHARLES LAMB 277 



which might be supposed to accompany its morbid effects upon 
the bodily system, but some other, more direct, subtle, and 
exclusive ; and this, of whatever nature, may possibly extend to 
the faculty oi judging. 

Such, however, over and above the more known and more 
obvious ill effects upon the spirits and the health, were some 
of the stronger and more subtle effects of opium in disturbing 
the intellectual system, as well as the animal, the functions of 
the will also no less than those of the intellect, from which both 
Coleridge and myself were suffering at the period to which I 
now refer (1821-25)— evils which found their fullest exemplifi- 
cation in the very act upon which circunistances had now 
thrown me as the sine qua non of my extrication from diffi- 
culties — viz. the act of literary composition. This necessity, 
the fact of its being my one sole resource for the present, and 
the established experience which I now had of the peculiar 
embarrassments and counteracting forces which I should find 
in opium, but still more in the train of consequences left behmd 
by past opium— strongly co-operated with the mere physical 
despondency arising out of the liver. And this state of partial 
unhappiness, amongst other outward indications, expressed 
itself by one mark, which some people are apt greatly to mis- 
apprehend, as if it were some result of a sentimental turn of 
feeling— I mean perpetual sighs. But medical men must very 
well know, that a certain state of the liver, mechanically, and 
without any co-operation of the will, expresses itself in sighs. 
I was much too firm-minded, and too reasonable, to murmur 
or complain. I certainly suffered deeply, as one who finds him- 
self a banished man from all that he loves, and who had not 
the consolation of hope, but feared too profoundly that all my 
efforts— efforts poisoned so sadly by opium— might be unavail- 
ing for the end. But still I endured in silence. The mechanical 
sighs, however, revealed, or seemed to reveal, what was present 
in my thoughts. Lamb doubtless remarked them ; he knew the 
general outline of my situation ; and, after this, he set himself, 
with all the kindness of a brother, Miss Lamb with the kindness 
of a sister, to relieve my gloom by the closest attentions. They 
absolutely persecuted me with hospitalities ; and, as it was by 
their fireside that I feh most cheered, and sometimes elevated 
into hope, it may be supposed that I did not neglect to avail my- 
self of the golden hours thus benignantly interposed amongst 
my hours of solitude, despondency, and labour but partially ef- 
fectual. , - T 1- J ^4. 

Thus then it arose, and at this period, that I had my tirst 



278 DE QUINCE Y 

experience of Lamb's nature and peculiar powers. During one 
part of the time, I, whose lodgings were in York Street, Co- 
vent Garden, became near neighbour to the Lambs — who 
(with a view to the two great theatres, I believe) emigrated for 
some months from the Temple to Russell Street. With their 
usual delicacy, the Lambs seemed to guess that, in my frame 
of mind, society of a mixed character might not be acceptable 
to me. Accordingly, they did not ask me to their parties, 
unless where they happened to be small ones; but, as often as 
they were free of engagements themselves, they would take no 
denial — come I must, to dine with them and stay as late as I 
would. The very first time on which these dinner invitations 
began, a scene occurred with Charles Lamb, which so nearly 
resembled the Coleridge and " Ancient Mariner " mystification 
of years long past, that perhaps, with all my knowledge of his 
character, I might have supposed him angry or offended in 
good earnest, had I not recurred to the lesson of that early intro- 
ductory visit to the Temple. Some accident, or perhaps it was 
Lamb himself, had introduced the subject of Hazlitt. Aware 
of Lamb's regard for him, and of what I esteemed his exagger- 
ated estimate of Hazlitt's powers, I fought shy of any opinion 
upon him. The fact is, somewhere about that time — but I 
am not sure whether this had yet happened — Hazlitt had pub- 
lished a little book which was universally laughed at, but which 
in one view of it, greatly raised him in my opinion, by showing 
him to be capable of stronger and more agitating passions than 
I believed to be within the range of his nature. He had pub- 
lished his " Liber Amoris, or the Modern Pygmalion." And 
the circumstances of the case were these: In a lodging- 
house, which was also, perhaps, a boarding-house, in the neigh- 
bourhood of Lincoln's Inn, Hazlitt had rooms. The young 
woman who waited on him, was a daughter of the master of 
the house. She is described by Hazlitt, whose eye had been 
long familiar with the beauty (real or ideal) of the painters, 
as a woman of bewitching features; though one thing, which 
he confesses in his book, or did confess in conversation, made 
much against it — viz. that she had a look of being somewhat 
jaded, as if she were unwell, or the freshness of the animal 
sensibilities gone by. This girl must evidently have been a 
mercenary person. Well, if she were not an intriguer in the 
worst sense — in the sense of a schemer, she certainly was. 
Hazlitt, however, for many weeks (months perhaps) paid her 
the most delicate attentions, attributing to her a refinement and 
purity of character to which he afterwards believed that she 



CHARLES LAMB 279 

had no sort of pretensions. All this time — and here was the 
part of Hazlitt's conduct which extorted some sympathy and 
honour from me — he went up and down London, raving about 
this girl. Nothing else would he talk of. " Have you heard 

of Miss ?" And then, to the most indifferent stranger, 

he would hurry into a rapturous account of her beauty. For, 
this he was abundantly laughed at. And, as he could not fail 
to know this — (for the original vice of his character, was dark, 
sidelong suspicion, want of noble confidence in the nobilities 
of human nature, faith too infirm in what was good and 
great) — this being so, I do maintain that a passion, capable 
of stifling and transcending what was so prominent in his own 
nature, was, and must have been (however erroneously planted) 
a noble affection, and justifying that sympathy which I so cor- 
dially yielded him. I must reverence a man, be he what he 
may otherwise, who shows himself capable of profound love. 
On this occasion, in consequence of something I said, very 
much like what I am now saying, Hazlitt sent me a copy of 
his "Liber Amoris;" which, by the way, bore upon the title- 
page an engraved copy of a female figure — by what painter 
I forget at this moment, but I think by Titian — which, as Haz- 
litt imagined, closely resembled the object of his present adora- 
tion. The issue for Hazlitt, the unhappy issue of the tale, was 
as follows: The girl was a heartless coquette; her father was 
an humble tradesman, (a tailor, I think); but her sister had 
married very much above her rank; and she, who had the 
same or greater pretensions personally, now stood on so far 
better ground than her sister, as she could plead, which origi- 
nally her sister could not, some good connections. Partly, 
therefore, she acted in a spirit of manoeuvring as regarded Haz- 
litt; he might do as a pis aller, but she hoped to do better; 
partly also she acted on a more natural impulse. It happened 
that, amongst the gentleman lodgers, was another more 
favoured by nature, as to person, than ever Hazlitt had been; 
and Hazlitt was now somewhat withered by life and its cares. 
This stranger was her " fancy-man." Hazlitt suspected some- 
thing of this for a long time; suspected, doted, and was again 
persuaded to abandon his suspicions; and yet he could not 
relish her long conversations with this gentleman. What could 
they have to say, unless their hearts furnished a subject? 
Probably the girl would have confessed at once a preference, 
which, perhaps, she might have no good reason for denying, 
had it' not been that Hazlitt's lavish liberality induced him to 
overwhelm her with valuable presents. These she had no mind 



28o DE QUINCEY 

to renounce. And thus she went on, deceiving and beguiling, 
and betraying poor HazHtt, now half-crazy with passion, until 
one fatal Sunday. On that day, (the time was evening, in the 
dusk), with no particular object, but unhappy because he knew 
that she was gone out, and with some thought that, in the 
wilderness of London, he might, by chance, stumble upon her, 
Hazlitt went out; and not a half mile had he gone, when, all 
at once, he fancied that he saw her. A second and nearer 
glance showed him that he was right. She it was, but hanging 
on the arm of the hated rival — of him whom she had a hun- 
dred times sworn that she never spoke to but upon the business 
of the house. Hazlitt saw, but was not seen. In the blindness 
of love, hatred, and despair, he followed them home ; kept close 
behind them; was witness to the blandishments freely inter- 
changed, and soon after he parted with her for ever. Even 
his works of criticism, this dissembling girl had accepted or 
asked for as presents, with what affectation and hypocrisy Haz- 
litt now fully understood. In his book, he, in a manner, 
"whistles her down the wind;" notwithstanding that, even at 
that time, "her jesses" were even yet "his heart-strings." 
There is, in the last apostrophe to her — " Poor weed ! " — some- 
thing which, though bitter and contemptuous, is yet tender 
and gentle; and, even from the book, but much more from the 
afifair itself, as then reported with all its necessary circum- 
stances, something, which redeemed Hazlitt from the reproach 
(which till then he bore) of being open to no grand or pro- 
found enthusiasm — no overmastering passion. But now he 
showed indeed — 

" The nympholepsy of some fond despair." 

Perhaps this furnished the occasion of our falling upon the 
subject of Hazlitt. What was said will better come in upon 
another occasion — (viz. that of Hazlitt.) Meantime that 
Lamb only counterfeited anger, appeared from this — that, 
after tea, he read me his own fine verses on " The Three 
Graves; " and, that I might not go off with the notion that he 
read only his own verses, afterwards he read, and read beauti- 
fully — for of all our poets Lamb only and Wordsworth read 
well — a most beautiful sonnet of Lord Thurlow, on " Lacken 
Water." 

In answer to what I considered Lamb's extravagant esti- 
mate of Hazlitt, I had said, that the misanthropy which gives 
so unpleasant a tone to that writer's works, was, of itself, suffi- 
cient to disgust a reader whose feelings do not happen to flow 



CHARLES LAMB 28 1 

in that channel; that it was, moreover, a crude misanthropy, 
not resting upon any consistent basis, representing no great 
principles, good or bad, but simply the peevishness of a dis- 
appointed man, I admitted that such a passion as a noble mis- 
anthropy was possible; but that there was an ignoble misan- 
thropy; or, (taking an illustration, which I knew would tell 
with Lamb better than all arguments,) on the one hand, there 
was the lofty, nay sublime, misanthropy of Timon; on the other, 
the low villainous misanthropy of Apemantus. Now, the cyni- 
cism of Hazlitt, as also of another writer, who, in our times, 
affected misanthropy, if not exactly that of Apemantus, was 
too much akin to it; not built on the wild indignation of a 
generous nature, outraged in its best feelings, but in the envy 
of a discontented one. Lamb paused a little; but at length said, 
that it was for the intellectual Hazlitt, not the moral Hazlitt, 
that he professed so much admiration. Now, as all people 
must admit the splendid originality of much that Hazlitt has 
done, here there might have been a ready means, by favour of 
the latitude allowed to general expressions, for one, like me, 
who disliked disputing, to efifect a compromise with my oppo- 
nent. But, unfortunately. Lamb chose to insinuate (whether 
sincerely and deliberately I cannot say) that Hazlitt was another 
Coleridge; and that, allowing for his want of poetic power, he 
was non tarn impar quam dispar. This I could not stand. 
I, whose studies had been chiefly in the field of philosophy, 
could judge of that, if I could judge of anything; and certainly 
I felt entitled to say that anything which Hazlitt might have 
attempted in philosophy — as his " Essay on the Principles of 
Human Action," and his polemic " Essay against the Hartleian 
Theory " — supposing even that these were not derived entirely 
from Coleridge (as Coleridge used to assert) — could, at the 
best, be received only as evidences of ingenuity and a natural 
turn for philosophizing; but, for any systematic education or 
regular course of reading in philosophy, these little works are 
satisfactory proofs that Hazlitt had them not. The very lan- 
guage and terminology which belong to philosophy, and are 
indispensable to its free motion, do not seem to have been 
known to him. And, whatever gleams of wandering truth 
might flash at times upon his mind, he was at the mercy of every 
random impulse; had no principles upon any subject; was emi- 
nently one-sided; and viewed all things under the angle which 
chance circumstances presented, never from a central station. 
Something of this I said, not wishing or hoping to disturb 
Lamb's opinion, but piqued a little by what seemed to me not so 



282 DE QUINCEY 

much honour done to Hazlitt as wrong done to Coleridge. 
Lamb felt, or counterfeited a warmth, that for the moment 
looked like anger. " I know not," he said, " where you have 
been so lucky as to find finer thinkers than Hazlitt; for my part, 
I know of none such. You live, I think, or have lived, in Gras- 
mere. Well, I was once there. I was at Keswick, and all over 
that wild country; yet none such could I find there. But, stay, 
there are the caves in your neighbourhood, as well as the lakes ; 
these we did not visit. No, Mary," turning to his sister, " you 
know we didn't visit the caves. So, perhaps, these great men 
live there. Oh! yes, doubtless, they live in the caves of West- 
moreland. But you must allow for us poor Londoners. Haz- 
litt serves for our purposes. And in this poor, little, incon- 
siderable place of London, he is one of our very prime thinkers. 
But certainly I ought to have made an exception in behalf of 
the philosophers in the caves." And thus he ran on, until it 
was difficult to know whether to understand him in jest or 
earnest. However, if he felt any vexation, it was gone in a 
moment; and he showed his perfect freedom from any relic 
of irritation, by reading to me one or two of his own beautiful 
compositions — particularly " The Three Graves." Lamb read 
remarkably well. There was rather a defect of vigour in his 
style of reading; and it was a style better suited to passages of 
tranquil or solemn movement, than to those of tumultuous pas- 
sion. But his management of the pauses were judicious, his 
enunciation very distinct, his tones melodious and deep, and his 
cadences well executed. The book from which he read, was a 
folio manuscript, in which he had gathered together a number 
of gems, either his own, or picked up at random from any 
quarter, no matter how little in the sunshine of the world, that 
happened to strike his fancy. Amongst them was one which 
he delighted to read to his friends, as well on account of its 
real beauty, as because it came from one who had been 
unworthily treated and so far resembled himself. It was a 
sonnet of Lord Thurlow, a young poet of those days, who has, 
I believe, been long dead. I know not whether there is any- 
thing besides of equal value amongst this noble writer's works; 
but assuredly the man who could have written this one sonnet, 
was no fair subject for the laughter which saluted him on his 
public appearance as an author. It was a sonnet on seeing 
some birds in a peculiar attitude by the side of Lacken Water. 
And the sentiment expressed was thankfulness to nature for her 
bounty in scattering instruction everywhere, and food for medi- 
tation, far transcending in value, as well as in extent, all the 



CHARLES LAMB 283 

teaching of the schools. But the point of the whole, which 
peculiarly won Lamb's approbation, was the way in which the 
poet had contrived to praise the one fountain of knowledge 
without disparaging the other. Accordingly, Lamb used 
always to solicit the hearer's attention, by reading it twice over, 
to that passage — 

" There need not schools, nor the Professor's chair, 
Though these be good, to " 

This sudden turning aside to disclaim any blame of the one 
power, because he was proclaiming the all-sufficiency of the 
other, delighted Lamb, as a peculiarly graceful way of express- 
ing the catholic charity which becomes a poet. For it is a 
maxim to which Lamb often gave utterance, (see, for instance, 
his letters to Bernard Barton,) that the genial efifect of praise 
or admiration is robbed of its music, and untuned, by founding 
it upon some blame or harsh disparagement of a kindred object. 
If blame be right and called for, then utter it boldly ; but do not 
poison the gracious charities of intellectual love and reverence, 
when settling upon grand objects, nor sully the brightness of 
those objects, by forcing the mind into a remembrance of some- 
thing that cannot be comprehended within the same genial feel- 
ings. No maxim could better display the delicacy and purity 
of Lamb's childlike spirit of love, to which it was a disturbance 
and a torture even to be reminded that there was anything 
existing that was legitimately a subject for a frown or a scowl. 

About this time it was — the time, viz. from 1821 to 1825 — 
that Lamb first, to my knowledge, fell into the habit of sleeping 
for half an hour or so after dinner. These occasions exhibited 
his countenance in its happiest aspect; his slumbers were as 
tranquil as those of the healthiest infant; and the serene 
benignity of his features became, in those moments, as I have 
heard many persons remark, absolutely angelic. That was the 
situation for an artist to have chosen, in order to convey an 
adequate impression of his countenance. The portrait of him, 
prefixed to Serjeant Talfourd's book, is far from being a good 
likeness; it has the air of a Venetian senator, and far more 
resembles Mr. Hamilton Reynolds, the distinguished wit, 
dressed for an evening party, than Charles Lamb. The whole- 
length sketch is better; but the nose appears to me much 
exaggerated in its curve. 

With respect to Lamb's personal habits, much has been said 
of his intemperance; and his biographer justly remarks, that a 
false impression prevails upon this subject. In eating, he was 



284 I>E QUINCE Y 

peculiarly temperate; and, with respect to drinking, though his 
own admirable wit, (as in that delightful letter to Mr. Carey, 
where he describes himself, when confided to the care of some 
youthful protector, as " an old reprobate Telemachus consigned 
to the guidance of a wise young Mentor") — though, I say, 
his own admirable wit has held up too bright a torch to the 
illumination of his own infirmities, so that no efforts of pious 
friendship could now avail to disguise the truth, yet it must 
not be forgotten — first. That we are not to imagine Lamb's 
frailty in this respect habitual or deliberate — he made many 
powerful resistances to temptation; secondly, he often succeeded 
for long seasons in practicing entire abstinence; thirdly, when 
he did yield to the mingled temptation of wine, social pleasure, 
and the expansion of his own brotherly heart, that prompted 
him to entire sympathy with those around him, (and it cannot 
be denied that, for any one man to preserve an absolute sobriety 
amongst a jovial company, wears too much the churlish air of 
playing the spy upon the privileged extravagances of festive 
mirth) — whenever this did happen. Lamb, never, to my 
knowledge, passed the bounds of an agreeable elevation. He 
was joyous, radiant with wit and frolic, mounting with the sud- 
den motion of a rocket into the highest heaven of outrageous 
fun and absurdity; then bursting into a fiery shower of puns, 
chasing syllables with the agility of a squirrel bounding 
amongst the trees, or a cat pursuing its own tail; but, in the 
midst of all this stormy gayety, he never said or did anything 
that could by possibility wound or annoy. The most notice- 
able feature in his intoxication, was the suddenness with which 
it ascended to its meridian. Half a dozen glasses of wine taken 
during dinner — for everybody was encouraged, by his sun- 
shiny kindness, to ask him to take wine — these with perhaps 
one or two after dinner, sufficed to complete his inebriation to 
the crisis of sleep; after awaking from which, so far as I know, 
he seldom recommenced drinking. This sudden consumma- 
tion of the effects was not, perhaps, owing to a weaker, (as 
Serjeant Talfourd supposes,) but rather to a more delicate and 
irritable system, than is generally found amongst men. The 
sensibility of his organization was so exquisite, that effects 
which travel by separate stages with most other men, in him 
fled along the nerves with the velocity of light. He had great 
merit in his frequent trials of abstinence; for the day lost its 
most golden zest, when he had not the genial evening on which 
to fasten his anticipations. True, his mornings were physi- 
cally more comfortable upon this system; but then, unfor- 



CHARLES LAMB 285 

tunately, that mode of pleasure was all reaped and exhausted 
in the act of enjoyment, whilst the greater pleasure of antici- 
pation, that (as he complained himself) was wanting unavoid- 
ably, because the morning unhappily comes at the wrong end 
of the day; so that you may indeed look back to it as some- 
thing which you have lost, through the other hours of the day ; 
but you can never look forward to it as something which is 
coming. 

It is forever to be regretted that so many of Lamb's jests, 
repartees, and pointed saying-s, should have perished irrecover- 
ably; and from their fugitive brilliancy, which, (as Serjeant 
Talfourd remarks,) often dazzled too much to allow of the 
memory coolly retracing them some hours afterwards; it is 
also to be regretted that many have been improperly reported. 
One, for instance, which had been but half told to his 
biographer, was more circumstantially and more efifectually 
related thus, in my hearing, at Professor Wilson's, by Dr. Bow- 
ring, soon after the occasion. It occurred at Mr. Coleridge's 
weekly party at Highgate. Somebody had happened to men- 
tion that letter of Dr. Pococke, upon the Arabic translation of 
" Grotius de Veritate Fidei Christ.," in which he exposes the 
want of authority for the trite legend of Mahomet's pigeon, and 
justly insists upon the necessity of expunging a fable so certain 
to disgust learned Mussulmans, before the books were circu- 
lated in the East. This occasioned a conversation generally, 
upon the Mahometan creed, theology, and morals; in the course 
of which some young man, introduced by Edward Irving, had 
thought fit to pronounce a splendid declamatory eulogium upon 
Mahomet and all his doctrines. This, as a pleasant extrava- 
gance, had amused all present. Some hours after, when the 
party came to separate, this philo-Mahometan missed his hat, 
upon which, whilst a general search for it was going on, Lamb, 
turning to the stranger, said — "Hat, sir! — your hat! Don't 
you think you came in a turban?" The fact that the hat was 
missing, which could not have been anticipated by Lamb, shows 
his readiness, and so far improves the Sergeant's version of 
the story. 

Finally, without attempting, in this place, any elaborate analy- 
sis of Lamb's merits, (which would be no easy task,) one word 
or two may be said generally, about the position he is entitled 
to hold in our literature, and, comparatively, in European 
literature. His biographer thinks that Lamb had more points 
of resemblance to Professor Wilson, than to any other eminent 
person of the day. It would be presumptuous to dismiss too 



286 DE QUINCEY 

hastily any opinion put forward by the author of " Ion ; " other- 
wise, I confess, that, for my own part, knowing both parties 
most intimately,! cannot perceive much closer resemblance than 
what must always be found between two men of genius; whilst 
the differences seem to me radical. To notice only two points, 
Professor Wilson's mind is, in its movement and style of feel- 
ing, eminently diffusive — Lamb's discontinuous and abrupt. 
Professor Wilson's humour is broad, overwhelming, riotously 
opulent — Lamb's is minute, delicate, and scintillating. In 
one feature, though otherwise as different as possible. Lamb 
resembles Sir Walter Scott — viz. in the dramatic character 
of his mind and taste. Both of them recoiled from the high 
ideality of such a mind as Milton's; both loved the mixed 
standards of the world as it is — the dramatic standards in 
which good and evil are intermingled; in short, that class of 
composition in which a human character is predominant. 
Hence, also, in the great national movements, and the revolu- 
tionary struggles, which, in our times, have gone on in so 
many interesting parts of the world, neither $ir Walter Scott 
nor Lamb much sympathized, nor much affected to sympa- 
thize, with the aspirations after some exaltation for human 
nature by means of liberty, or the purification of legal codes or 
of religious creeds. They were content with things as they 
are; and, in the dramatic interest attached to these old realities, 
they found sufficient gratification for all their sensibilities. In 
one thing, upon consideration, there does strike me, some 
resemblance between Lamb and Professor W^ilson — viz. in the 
absence of affectation, and the courageous sincerity which 
belong to both; and also, perhaps, as Serjeant Talfourd has 
remarked, in the comprehensiveness of their liberality towards 
all, however opposed to themselves, who have any intellectual 
distinctions to recommend them. 

But, recurring to the question I have suggested of Lamb's 
general place in literature, I shall content myself with indicating 
my own views of that point, without, however, pausing to 
defend them. In the literature of every nation, we are naturally 
disposed to place in the highest rank those who have produced 
some great and colossal work — a " Paradise Lost," a " Ham- 
let," a " Novum Organum " — which presupposes an effort of 
intellect, a comprehensive grasp, and a sustaining power, for its 
original conception, corresponding in grandeur — to that 
effort, different in kind, which must preside in its exe- 
cution. But, after this highest class, in which the power 
to conceive and the power to execute are upon the same 



CHARLES LAMB 287 

scale of grandeur, there comes a second, in which brilUant 
powers of execution, appHed to conceptions of a very 
inferior range, are allowed to establish a classical rank. 
Every literature possesses, besides its great national gal- 
lery, a cabinet of minor pieces, not less perfect in their 
polish, possibly more so. In reality, the characteristic of 
this class is elaborate perfection — the point of inferiority is not 
in the finishing, but in the compass and power of the original 
creation, which (however exquisite in its class) moves within a 
smaller sphere. To this class belong, for example, " The Rape 
of the Lock," that finished jewel of English literature; "The 
Dunciad," (a still more exquisite gem;) "The Vicar of Wake- 
field," (in its earlier part;) in German, the " Luise" of Voss; in 
French — what? Omitting some others that might be named, 
above all others, the " Fables " of La Fontaine. He is the pet 
and darling, as it were, of the French literature. Now, I affirm 
that Charles Lamb occupies a corresponding station to his own 
literature. I am not speaking (it will be observed) of kinds, 
but of degrees in literary merit ; and Lamb I hold to be, as with 
respect to English literature, that which La Fontaine is with 
respect to French. For, though there may be little resem- 
blance otherwise, in this, they agree, that both were wayward 
and eccentric humourists; both confined their efforts to short 
flights; and both, according to the standards of their several 
countries, were occasionally, and, in a lower key, poets. The 
brutal " Tales " of La Fontaine do not merit to be considered in 
such an estimate; for they are simply vulgar and obscene jokes 
thrown into a metrical version, and are never treated, as indeed 
they rarely could be treated, poetically. The " Fables " ' are a 
work of more pretension; and throughout the works of La 
Fontaine there is an occasional felicity in the use of conver- 
sational phrases and conversational forms. But if any reader 
would wish to see the difference between an inspired writer and 
a merely naif writer of unusual cleverness — if he would wish 
to see the magical effects that may be produced upon the sim- 
plest incidents by a truly poetic treatment — I would recom- 
mend to his notice the fable of the oak and the broom, as told 
by Wordsworth, with one on the same subject by La Fontaine. 
In the one fable, such a soul is introduced beneath the ribs of 
what else are lifeless symbols, that, instead of a somewhat 
comic effect, the reader is not surprised to find a pensive moral- 
ity breathing from the whole, and a genuine pathos attained, 
though couched in symbolic imag-es. But in La Fontaine we 
find, as usual, levity in the treatment, levity in the result, and 



288 DE QUINCEY 

his highest attainment lying in the naivete or picturesque 
raciness of his expressions. 

Wordsworth, however, it will be said, is not Lamb. No; but 
Lamb, although upon a lower scale, has something of the same 
difference in point of feeling; and his impulses, like those of 
Wordsworth, are derived from the depths of Nature, not from 
the surfaces of manners. We need not, indeed, wonder at the 
profounder feeling, and the more intense, as well as consistent 
originality of Lamb, when we contrast his character, disposi- 
tion, life, and general demeanour, as I have here endeavoured to 
sketch them, with what we know of La Fontaine, viewed under 
the same aspects. Not only was La Fontaine a vicious and 
heartless man, but it may be said of him, with perfect truth, that 
his whole life was a lie, and a piece of hollow masquerading. 
By some accident, he had gained the character of an absent 
man; and, for the sake of sustaining this distinction, with the 
poor result of making sport for his circle, he committed 
extravagances which argue equal defect of good sense and sin- 
cere feeling in him who was the actor, and in those who 
accredited them. A man, who could seriously afifect not to 
recognize his own son, and to put questions about him as about 
a stranger, must have been thoroughly wanting in truth of 
character. And we may be assured, that no depth of feeling 
in any walk of literature or poetry ever grew upon the basis 
of radical affectation. The very substratum of Lamb's char- 
acter, as I have said before, lay in the most intense hostility to 
affectation. This, however, touches the quality of their social 
merits; and at present I am merely concerned with the degree; 
having selected La Fontaine as that one amongst the French 
classics who best expresses by analogy the true position and 
relative rank which the voice of posterity will assign to Charles 
Lamb in the literature of his own country. His works — I 
again utter my conviction — will be received as amongst the 
most elaborately finished gems of literature; as cabinet speci- 
mens which express the utmost delicacy, purity, and tenderness 
of the national intellect, together with the rarest felicity of finish 
and expression, although it may be the province of other modes 
of literature to exhibit the highest models in the grandeur and 
more impassioned forms of intellectual power. Such is my 
own intimate conviction; and, accordingly, I reckon it amongst 
the rarest accidents of good fortune which have gilded my liter- 
ary experience, that, although residing too often at a vast 
distance from the metropolis to benefit by my opportunities so 
much as I desired, yet, by cultivating those which fell naturally 



CHARLES LAMB 289 

in my way at various periods, but, most of all, at that period 
when I may consider my judgment to have been maturest, I 
reaped so much delight from that intercourse, and so far 
improved it into a fraternal familiarity, as to warrant me in 
assuming the honourable distinction of having been a friend 
of Charles Lamb/ 

Notes 

^ It is a favourite doctrine with some of the Radical Reformers 
(thanks be to God! not with all), to vilify and disparage the war 
with France, from 1793 to 1815, not (as might, perhaps, consistently 
be done, during some of its years), but throughout and uncon- 
ditionally — in its objects, its results, its principles. Even contem- 
plating the extreme case of a conquest by France, some of the 
Radicals maintain, that we should not have suffered much; that the 
French were a civilized people; that, doubtless, they (here, however, 
it was forgotten that this " they " was not the French people, but the 
French army) would not have abused their power, even suppose 
them to have gained possession of London. Candid reader! read 
Duppa's account of the French reign in Rome; any account of 
Davoust's in Hamburg; any account of Junot's in Lisbon. 

^The technical memory, or that which depends upon purely 
arbitrary links of connection, and, therefore, more upon a nisus or 
separate activity of the mind — that memory, for instance, which 
recalls names — is undoubtedly afifected, and most powerfully, by 
opium. On the other hand, the logical memory, or that which recalls 
facts that are connected by fixed relations, and where A being given, 
B must go before or after — historical memory, for instance — is not 
much, if at all, afifected by opium. 

"* By the way, it has been made a matter of some wonder in the 
annals of literature, why La Fontaine was amongst the very few 
eminent writers of that age who did not bask in the court sunshine; 
and La Harpe, with many others, fancies that his " Tales " excluded 
him. But there is no wonder to those who are acquainted with his 
" Fables." The ludicrous picture which he constantly presents of 
courts, and courtiers, and royalty — in treating many of those 
fables which relate to the lion, etc. — must have confounded and 
mortified the pompous, scenical Louis XIV more than the most auda- 
cious acts of rebellion; and could not have been compensated by the 
hollow formality of a few stilted dedicatory addresses. 

*Among the prominent characteristics of Lamb, I know not how it 
is that I have omitted to notice the peculiar emphasis and depth of 
his courtesy. This quality was in him a really chivalrous feeling, 
springing from his heart, and cherished with the sanctity of a duty. 
He says somewhere in speaking of himself, under the mask of a 
third person, whose character he is describing, that, in passing a 
servant girl even at a street-crossing, he used to take oft his hat. 
Now, the spirit of Lamb's gallantry would have prompted some such 
expression of homage, though the customs of the country would not 
allow it to be literally fulfilled, for the very reason that would 
prompt it — viz. in order to pay respect — since the girl would, in 
such a case, suppose a man laughing at her. But the instinct of his 
heart was — to think highly of female nature, and to pay a real 
homage (not the hollow demonstration of outward honour, which a 

19 



290 DE QUINCE Y 

Frenchman calls his " homage," and which is really a mask for con- 
tempt) to the sacred idea of pure and virtuous womanhood. The 
one sole case I remember in which Lamb was betrayed into — not 
discourtesy — no, that could not be — but into a necessity of pub- 
licly professing a hostile feeling, was in the letter (now we may 
say celebrated letter) to Mr. Southey. To this, however, he was 
driven not by any hostile feeling towards Southey, but simply by a 
feeling too animated of sympathy with those who happened to be on 
questions of public interest hostile to Southey. Lamb, it must be 
remembered, was — that is, he called himself — a Dissenter. Was 
he such in reality? Not at all. So far from adopting the distinc- 
tions of his religious party, he was not even thoroughly aware of 
them. But with Lamb it happened, as with many another man, 
though careless of the distinctions which bound him to a party, still 
he was in profession faithful to his party, as a principle of honour. 
I know many men at this day, who, if left to choose a form of reli- 
gion — left unfettered by old family connections — would much pre- 
fer connecting themselves with the Church of England. But they are 
restrained and kept loyal to their section of dissent, not by religious 
considerations, but by worldly honour; the appealing look of the 
clergyman, resting perhaps his influence one-half upon old household 
recollections — upon the father whom he counselled, the grandfather 
he prayed with. Such look, such recollections, who could resist — 
who ought to resist? The only plan is this: When the old minister 
dies — in the interregnum — whilst as yet the new minister is not — 
bolt, cut and run. Lamb's situation was difficult; Southey assures 
us that he knew himself to be wrong; he did not. Your penitent 
Lamb was for the ear of Southey — he never meant it for the world. 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 



IT was, I think, in the month of August, but certainly 
in the summer season, and certainly in the year 
1807, that I first saw this illustrious man, the larg- 
est and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and the 
most comprehensive, in my judgment, that has yet 
existed amongst men. My knowledge of him as a man of 
most original genius began about the year 1799. A little 
before that time, Mr. Wordsworth had published the first edi- 
tion (in a single volume) of the " Lyrical Ballads," at the end or 
the beginning of which was placed Mr. Coleridge's poem of the 
"Ancient Mariner," as the contribution of an anonymous 
friend. It would be directing the reader's attention too much 
to myself, if I were to linger upon this, the greatest event in 
the unfolding of my own mind. Let me say in one word, that, 
at a period when neither the one nor the other writer was valued 
by the public — both having a long warfare to accomplish of 
contumely and ridicule before they could rise into their present 
estimation — I found in these poems " the ray of a new morn- 
ing," and an absolute revelation of untrodden worlds, teeming 
with power and beauty, as yet unsuspected amongst men. I 
may here mention that, precisely at the same time, Professor 
Wilson, about the same age as myself, received the same start- 
ling and profound impressions from the same volume. With 
feelings of reverential interest, so early and so deep, pointing 
towards two contemporaries, it may be supposed that I inquired 
eagerly after their names. But these inquiries were self-baffied, 
the same deep feelings which prompted my curiosity, causing 
me to recoil from all casual opportunities of pushing the inquiry, 
as too generally lying amongst those who gave no sign of 
participating in my feelings; and, extravagant as it may seem, 
I revolted with as much hatred from coupling my question with 
any occasion of insult to the persons whom it respected, as a 
primitive Christian from throwing frankincense upon^ the altars 
of Caesar, or a lover from giving up the name of his beloved 
to the coarse license of a Bacchanalian party. It is laughable 

291 



292 DE QUINCEY 

to record for how long a period my curiosity in this particular 
was self-defeated. Two years passed before I ascertained the 
two names. Mr. Wordsworth published his in the second and 
enlarged edition of the work; and for Mr. Coleridge's I was 
"indebted" to a private source; but I discharged that debt ill, 
for I quarrelled with my informant for what I considered his 
profane way of dealing with a subject so hallowed in my own 
thoughts. After this I searched east and west, north and 
south, for all known works or fragments of the same authors. 
I had read, therefore, as respects Mr. Coleridge, the Allegory 
which he contributed to Mr. Southey's " Joan of Arc." I had 
read his fine Ode, entitled "France," his "Ode to the Duchess of 
Devonshire," and various other contributions, more or less inter- 
esting, to the two volumes of the "Anthology," published at 
Bristol, about 1799- 1800, by Mr. Southey; and, finally, I had 
of course read the small volume of poems which passed under 
his name; these, however, as a juvenile and immature work, had 
in general greatly disappointed me. 

Meantime, it had crowned the interest which to me invested 
his name — that about the year 1804 or 1805, I had been 
informed by a gentleman from the English lakes, who knew 
him as a neighbour, that he had for some time applied his whole 
mind to metaphysics and psychology — which happened to be 
my own absorbing pursuit. From 1803 to 1808, I was a stu- 
dent at Oxford; and on the first occasion, when I could conve- 
niently have sought for a personal knowledge of one whom I 
contemplated with so much admiration, I was met by a dis- 
gusting assurance that he had quitted England, and was then 
residing at Malta in the quality of secretary (and occasionally 
as treasurer) to the Governor. I began to inquire about the 
best route to Malta; but, as any route at that time promised 
an inside place in a French prison, I reconciled myself to wait- 
ing; and at last, happening to visit a relative at the Bristol Hot- 
wells, in the summer of 1807, I had the pleasure to hear that 
Mr. Coleridge was not only once more upon English ground, 
but within forty and odd miles of my own station. In that 
same hour I mounted and bent my way to the south ; and before 
evening reaching a ferry on the river Bridgewater, at a village 
called, I think, Stogursey, (i. e. Stoke de Courcy, by way of 
distinction from other Stoke.) I crossed it, and a few miles 
further attained my object, viz. the little town of Nether Stowey, 
amongst the Quantock hills. Here I had been assured that 
I should find Mr. Coleridge, at the house of his old friend 
Mr. Poole. On presenting myself, however, to that gentle- 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 293 

man, I found that Coleridge was absent at Lord Egmont's, an 
elder brother (by the father's side) of Mr. Percival the minister, 
assassinated five years after; and as it was doubtful whether he 
might not then be on the wing to another friend's in the town 
of Bridgewater, I consented willingly, until his motions should 
be ascertained, to stay a day or two with this Mr. Poole, — a 
man on his own account well deserving a separate notice; for, 
as Coleridge afterwards remarked to me, he was almost an 
ideal model for a useful member of Parliament. He was a 
stout, plain-looking farmer, leading a bachelor life, in a rustic 
old-fashioned house; the house, however, upon further acquain- 
tance, proving to be amply furnished with modern luxuries, 
and especially with a good library, superbly mounted in all 
departments bearing at all upon political philosophy; and the 
farmer turning out a polished and liberal Englishman, who had 
travelled extensively, and had so entirely dedicated himself to 
the service of his humble fellow-countrymen, the hewers of 
wood and drawers of water in this southern region of Somerset- 
shire, that for many miles round he was the general arbiter of 
their disputes, the guide and counsellor of their daily lives; 
besides being appointed executor and guardian to his children 
by every third man who died in or about the town of Nether 
Stowey. 

The first morning of my visit, Mr. Poole was so kind as to 
propose, knowing my admiration of Wordsworth, that we 
should ride over to Alfoxton, — a place of singular interest to 
myself, as having been occupied in his unmarried days by that 
poet, during the minority of Mr. St. Aubyn, its present youthful 
proprietor. At this delightful spot, the ancient residence of an 
ancient English family and surrounded by those ferny Quan- 
tock hills which are so beautifully sketched in the poem of 
"Ruth," Wordsworth, accompanied by his sister, had passed the 
whole of the interval between leaving the University (Cam- 
bridge), and the period of his final settlement amongst his 
native lakes of Westmoreland, except only one year spent in 
France, some months in North Germany, and a space, I know 
not how long, spent at Race Down in Dorsetshire. 

Returning late from this interesting survey, we found our- 
selves without company at dinner; and, being thus seated tete-a- 
tete, Mr. Poole propounded the following question to me, 
which I mention, because it furnished me with the first hint of 
a singular infirmity besetting Coleridge's mind: "Pray, my 
young friend, did you ever form any opinion, or rather — did 
it ever happen to you to meet with any rational opinion or con- 



294 ^^ QUINCE Y 

jecture of others, upon that most irrational dogma of Pytha- 
goras about beans? You know what I mean: that monstrous 
doctrine in which he asserts that a man might as well, for the 
wickedness of the thing, eat his own grandmother as meddle 
with beans." 

" Yes," I replied : " the line is in the Golden Verses. I 
remember it well." 

P. — "True: now our dear excellent friend Coleridge, than 
whom God never made a creature more divinely endowed, yet 
strange it is to say, sometimes steals from other people, just 
as you or I might do; I beg your pardon — just as a poor 
creature like myself might do, that sometimes have not where- 
withal to make a figure from my own exchequer : and the other 
day, at a dinner-party, this question arising about Pythagoras 
and his beans, Coleridge gave us an interpretation, which, from 
his manner, I suspect to have been not original. Think, there- 
fore, if you have anywhere read a plausible solution." 

" I have : and it was in a German author. This German, 
understand, is a poor stick of a man, not to be named on the 
same day with Coleridge: so that, if it should appear that 
Coleridge has robbed him, be assured that he has done the 
scamp too much honour." 

P.—" Well: what says the German? " 

" Why, you know the use made in Greece of beans in voting 
and balloting? Well, the German says that Pythagoras speaks 
symbolically; meaning that electioneering, or, more generally, 
all interference with political intrigues, is fatal to a philosopher's 
pursuits and their appropriate serenity. Therefore, says he, 
follower of mine, abstain from public affairs as you would, from 
parricide." 

P. — " Well then, Coleridge has done the scamp too much 
honour: for, by Jove, that is the very explanation he gave us! " 

Here was a trait of Coleridge's mind, to be first made known 
to me by his best friend, and first published to the world by 
me, the foremost of his admirers! But both of us had suffi- 
cient reasons: Mr. Poole knew that, stumbled on by acci- 
dent, such a discovery would be likely to impress upon a man 
as yet unacquainted with Coleridge a most injurious jealousy 
with regard to all he might write; whereas, frankly avowed by 
one who knew him best, the fact was disarmed of its sting; 
since it thus became evident that where the case had been best 
known and most investigated, it had not operated to his serious 
disadvantage. On the same argument, to forestall, that is to 
say other discoverers who would make a more unfriendly use 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 295 

of the discovery, and also, as matters of literary curiosity, I 
shall here point out a few of Coleridge's unacknowledged obli- 
gations, detected by myself in a very wide course of readmg. 

I The hymn to Chamouni is an expansion of a short poem 
in stanzas, upon the same subject, by Frederica Brun, a female 
poet of Germany, previously known to the world under her 
maiden name of Miinter. The mere framework of the poem 
is exactly the same,— an appeal to the most impressive features 
of the regal mountain, (Mount Blanc,) citing them to proclaim 
their author: the torrent, for instance, is required to say, by 
whom it had been arrested in its headlong ravings, and stittened, 
as by the petrific mace of Death, into everlasting pillars of ice; 
and the answer to these impassioned apostrophes is made by the 
same choral burst of rapture. In mere logic, therefore, and 
even as to the choice of circumstances, Coleridge's poem is a 
translation. On the other hand, by a judicious amplification of 
some topics, and by its far deeper tone of lyrical enthusiasm, 
the dry bones of the German outline have been created by 
Coleridge into the fulness of life. It is not, therefore, a para- 
phrase, but a recast of the original. And how was this calcu- 
lated, if frankly avowed, to do Coleridge any injury with the 

JUDICIOUS ^^^^ singular case of Coleridge's infirmity is this: — 
In a very noble passage of '' France" a fine expression or two 
occur from " Samson Agonistes." Now to take a phrase or an 
inspiring Hne from the great fathers of poetry, even though 
no marks of quotation should be added, carries with it no 
charge of plagiarism. Milton is presumed to be as familiar 
to the ear as nature to the eye; and to steal from him as impos- 
sible as to appropriate, or sequester to a private use, some 
"bright particular star." And there is a good reason for reject- 
ing the typographical marks of quotation: they break the con- 
tinuity of the passion, by reminding the reader of a printed 
book; on which account Milton himself, (to give an mstance,) 
has not marked the sublime words, " tormented all the air, as 
borrowed; nor has Wordsworth, in applying to an unprincipled 
woman of commanding beauty the memorable expression, a 
weed of glorious feature," thought it necessary to acknowledge 
it as originally belonging to Spenser. Some dozens of similar 
cases might be adduced from Milton. But Mr. Coleridge, in 
describing France as 

" Her footsteps insupportably advancing," 
not satisfied with omitting the marks of acknowledgment, 



296 DE QUINCEY 

thought fit positively to deny that he was indebted to Milton. 
Yet who could forget that semi-chorus in the " Samson/' where 
the "bold Ascalonite" is described as having "fled from his lion 
ramp? " Or who, that was not in this point liable to some hallu- 
cination of judgment, would have ventured on a public chal- 
lenge (for virtually it was that) to produce from the " Samson,'^ 
words so impossible to be overlooked as those of " insupport- 
ably advancing the footsteps?" The result, as I remember, 
was, that one of the critical journals placed the two passages 
in juxtaposition, and left the reader to his own conclusions 
with regard to the poet's veracity. But in this instance, it was 
common sense rather than veracity which the facts impeach. 

3. In the year 1810 I happened to be amusing myself, by 
reading, in their chronological order, the great classical cir- 
cumnavigations of the earth ; and, coming to Shelvocke, I met 
with a passage to this effect: That Hatley, his second cap- 
tain, (i. e. lieutenant,) being a melancholy man, was possessed 
by a fancy that some long season of foul weather was due to an 
albatross which had steadily pursued the ship; upon which he 
shot the bird, but without mending their condition. There 
at once I saw the germ of the " Ancient Mariner; " and I put a 
question to Coleridge accordingly. Could it have been 
imagined that he would see cause utterly to disown so slight 
an obligation to Shelvocke? Wordsworth, a man of stern 
veracity, on hearing of this, professed his inability to under- 
stand Coleridge's meaning; the fact being notorious, as he told 
me, that Coleridge had derived, from the very passage I had 
cited, the original hint for the action of the poem ; though it is 
very possible, from something which Coleridge said, on another 
occasion, that before meeting a fable in which to embody his 
ideas, he had meditated a poem on delirium, confounding its 
own dream scenery with external things, and connected with 
the imagery of high latitudes. 

4. All these cases amount to nothing at all as cases of pla- 
giarism, and for that reason expose the more conspicuously 
that obhquity of feeling which could seek to decline the very 
slight acknowledgments required. But now I come to a case 
of real and palpable plagiarism; yet that too of a nature to be 
quite unaccountable in a man of Coleridge's attainments. It 
is not very likely, that this particular case will soon be detected ; 
but others will. Yet who knows? Eight hundred or a thou- 
sand years hence, some cursed reviewer may arise, who having 
read the "BiographiaLiteraria" of Coleridge, will afterwards read 
the Miscellaneous Philosophical Essays ^ of Schelling, the great 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 297 

Bavarian professor — a man in some respects worthy to be 
Coleridge's assessor; and he will then make a singular dis- 
covery. In the "Biographia Literaria" occurs a dissertation upon 
the reciprocal relations of the " Esse " and the " Cogitare ; " and 
an attempt is made, by inverting the postulates from which the 
argument starts, to show how each might arise as a product, 
by an intelligible genesis, from the other. It is a subject, which, 
since the time of Fichte, has much occupied the German meta- 
physicians; and many thousands of essays have been written 
on it, of which many hundreds have been read by many tens 
of persons. Coleridge's essay, in particular, is prefaced by a 
few words, in which, aware of his coincidence with Schelling, 
he declared his willingness to acknowledge himself indebted to 
so great a man, in any case where the truth would allow him to 
do so; but in this particular case, insisting on the impossibility 
that he could have borrowed arguments which he had first 
seen some years after he had thought out the whole hypothesis 
proprio marte. After this, what was my astonishment, to find 
that the entire essay from the first word to the last is a ver- 
batim translation from Schelling, with no attempt in a single 
instance to appropriate the paper, by developing the arguments 
or by diversifying the illustrations! Some other obligations to 
Schelling of a slighter kind, I have met with in the "Biographia 
Literaria;" but this was a barefaced plagiarism, which could in 
prudence have been risked only by relying too much upon the 
slight knowledge of German literature in this country, and 
especially of that section of the German literature. Had then 
Coleridge any need to borrow from Schelling? Did he borrow 
in forma pauperis? Not at all: — there lay the wonder. He 
spun daily and at all hours, for mere amusement of his own 
activities, and from the loom of his own magical brain, theories 
more gorgeous by far, and supported by a pomp and luxury 
of images, such as Schelling — no, nor any German that ever 
breathed, not John Paul — could have emulated in his dreams. 
With the riches of El Dorado lying about him, he would con- 
descend to filch a handful of gold from any man whose purse 
he fancied ; and in fact reproduced in a new form, applying itself 
to intellectual wealth, that maniacal propensity which is some- 
times well known to attack enormous proprietors and million- 
aires for acts of petty larceny. The last Duke of Anc — ^ 

could not abtain from exercising his furtive mania upon articles 
so humble as silver spoons ; and it was the daily care of a pious 
daughter, watching over the good name of her father, to have 



298 DE QUINCEY 

his pockets searched by a confidential valet, and the claimants 
of the purloined articles traced out. 

Many cases have crossed me in life of people, otherwise not 
wanting in principle, who had habits, or at least hankerings, 
of the same kind. And the phrenologists, I believe, are well 
acquainted with the case, its signs, its progress, and its history. 
Dismissing, however, this subject, which I have at all noticed, 
only that I might anticipate and (in old English) that I might 
prevent the uncandid interpreter of its meaning, I will assert 
finally, that, after having read for thirty years in the same 
track as Coleridge, — that track in which few of any age will 
ever follow us, such as German metaphysicians, Latin school- 
men, thaumaturgic Platonists, religious Mystics, — and having 
thus discovered a large variety of trivial thefts, I do, neverthe- 
less, most heartily believe him to have been as entirely original 
in all his capital pretensions, as any one man that ever has 
existed; as Archimedes in ancient days, or as Shakspeare in 
modern. Did the reader ever see Milton's account of the rub- 
bish contained in the Greek and Latin fathers? or did he ever 
read a statement of the monstrous chaos with which an African 
•Obeah man stuf¥s his enchanted scarecrows? or, to take a more 
common illustration, did he ever amuse himself by searching 
the pockets of a child — three years old, suppose, when buried 
in slumber after a long summer's day of out-a-door's intense 
activity? I have done this; and, for the amusement of the 
child's mother, have analyzed the contents, and drawn up a 
formal register of the whole. Philosophy is puzzled, conjec- 
ture and hypothesis are confounded, in the attempt to explain 
the law of selection, which can have presided in the child's 
labours: stones remarkable only for weight, old rusty hinges, 
nails, crooked skewers, stolen when the cook had turned her 
back, rags, broken glass, tea-cups having the bottom knocked 
out, and loads of similar jewels, were the prevailing articles in 
this proces verbal. Yet, doubtless, much labour had been 
incurred, some sense of danger perhaps, had been faced, and 
the anxieties of a conscious robber endured, in order to amass 
this splendid treasure. Such in value were the robberies of 
Coleridge ; such their usefulness to himself or anybody else ; and 
such the circumstances of uneasiness under which he had com- 
mitted them. I return to my narrative. 

Two or three days had slipped away in waiting for Coler- 
idge's re-appearance at Nether Stowey, when suddenly Lord 
Egmont called upon Mr. Poole, with a present for Coleridge; 
it was a canister of peculiarly fine snufif, which Coleridge now 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 299 

took profusely. Lord Egmont, on this occasion, spoke of 
Coleridge in the terms of excessive admiration, and urged 
Mr. Poole to put him upon undertaking some great monu- 
mental work, that might furnish a sufficient arena for the dis- 
play of his various and rare accomplishments; for his multitorm 
erudition on the one hand, for his splendid power of theorizing 
and combining large and remote notices of facts on the other. 
And he suggested, judiciously enough, as one theme which 
offered a field at once large enough and indefinite enough to suit 
a mind that could not show its full compass of power, unless 
upon very plastic materials— a " History of Christianity, in its 
progress and in its chief divarications into Church and becVwith 
a continual reference to the relations subsisting between Chris- 
tianity and the current philosophy; their occasional connections 
or approaches, and their constant mutual repulsions. But, at 
any rate, let him do something," said Lord Egmont; for at 
present he talks very much like an angel, and he does nothing at 
all " Lord Egmont, I understood from everybody to be a truly 
good and benevolent man; and, on this occasion, he spoke with 
an earnestness which agreed with my previous impression. 
Coleridge, he said, was now at the prime of his powers — unit- 
ing something of youthful vigour, with sufficient experience of 
Hfe- with the benefit besidfe of vast meditation, and of reading 
unusually decursive. No man had ever been better qualified to 
revive the heroic period of literature in England, and to give 
a character of weight to the philosophic 5^^,?!^^^°^°^ f'i -f ."J^c 
trv upon the Continent. "And what a pity," he added, if this 
man were, after all, to vanish like an apparition; and you, i, and 
a few others, who have witnessed his grand bravuras of dis- 
play, were to have the usual fortune of ghost-seers, in meeting 
no credit for any statements that we might vouch on his 

\o pursue my narrative. It now appeared that Lord 
Egmont's carriage had, some days before, conveyed Coleridge 
to Bridgewater, with a purpose of staying one single day at 
that place, and then returning to Mr. Poole's. From the sort 
of laugh with which Lord Egmont taxed his own simplicity, in 
having confided at all in the stability of any Coleridgian plan, I 
now gathered that procrastination in excess, was, or had 
beconie, a marked feature in Coleridge's daily life. Nobody 
who knew him ever thought of depending on any appointment 
he might make; spite of his uniformly honourable intentions, 
nobody attached any weight to his assurances in re futura: those 
who asked him to dinner or any other party, as a matter of 



300 DE QUINCEY 

course sent a carriage for him, and went personally or by proxy 
to fetch him; and, as to letters, unless the address were in some 
female hand that commanded his affectionate esteem, he tossed 
them all into one general dead-letter bureau, and rarely, I 
beHeve, opened them at all. Bourrienne mentions a mode of 
abridging the trouble attached to a very extensive correspond- 
ence, by which infinite labour was saved to himself and to 
Bonaparte, when commanding in Italy. Nine out of ten letters 
supposing them letters of business with official applications of a 
special kind, he contends, answer themselves: in other words, 
time alone must soon produce events which virtually contain 
the answer. On this principle the letters were opened periodi- 
cally, after intervals, suppose of six weeks; and, at the end of 
that time, it was found that not many remained to require any 
further more particular answer. Coleridge's plan, however, 
was shorter; he opened none, I understood, and answered none. 
At least such was his habit at that time. But on that same 
day, all this, which I heard now for the first time, with much 
concern, was fully explained : for already he was under the full 
dominion of opium, as he himself revealed to me, and with a 
deep expression of horror at the hideous bondage, in a private 
walk of some length, which I took with him about sunset. 

Lord Egmont's information, and the knowledge now gained 
of Coleridge's habits, making it very uncertain when I might 
see him in my present hospitable quarters, I immediately took 
my leave of Mr. Poole, and went over to Bridgewater. I had 
received directions for finding out the house where Coleridge 
was visiting; and, in riding down a main street of Bridgewater, 
I noticed a gateway corresponding to the description given me. 
Under this was standing, and gazing about him, a man whom 
I shall describe. In height he might seem to be about five feet 
eight; (he was, in reality, about an inch and a half taller, but 
his figure was of an order which drowns the height;) his per- 
son was broad and full, and tended even to corpulence; his 
complexion was fair, though not what painters technically style 
fair, because it was associated with black hair; his eyes were 
large and soft in their expression ; and it was from the peculiar 
appearance of haze or dreaminess, which mixed with their light, 
that I recognized my object. This was Coleridge. I examined 
him steadfastly for a minute or more; and it struck me that he 
saw neither myself nor any other object in the street. He was 
in a deep reverie; for I had dismounted, made two or three 
trifling arrangements at an inn door, and advanced close to him, 
before he had apparently become conscious of my presence. 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 3OI 

The sound of mv voice, announcing my own name, first awoke 
him: he started,' and for a moment seemed at a loss to under- 
stand my purpose or his own situation; for he repeated rapidly 
a number oi words which had no relation to either of us. There 
was no mauvaise honte in his manner, but simple perplexity, 
and an apparent difficulty in recovering his position amongst 
daylight realities. This little scene over, he received me with 
a kindness of manner so marked, that it might be called 
eracious. The hospitable family with whom he was domesti- 
cated, were distinguished for their amiable manners and 
enlightened understandings; they were descendants from 
Chubb, the philosophic writer, and bore the same name, i^or 
Coleridge, they all testified deep affection and esteem — senti- 
ments in which the whole town of Bridgewater seemed to share ; 
for in the evening, when the heat of the day had declined, i 
walked out with him; and rarely, perhaps never, have i seen a 
person so much interrupted in one hour's space as Coleridge, 
on this occasion, by the courteous attentions of young and old. 
All the people of station and weight in the place, and appar- 
ently all the ladies, were abroad to enjoy the lovely summer 
evening; and not a party passed without some mark of smihng 
recognition; and the majority stopping to make personal 
inquiries about his health; and to express their anxiety that he 
should make a lengthened stay amongst them. Certain i am, 
from the lively esteem expressed towards Coleridge, at this 
time, by the people of Bridgewater, that a very large subscrip- 
tion might in that town have been raised to support him 
amongst them, in the character of a lecturer, or philosophical 
professor. Especially, I remarked, that the young men of the 
place manifested the most liberal interest in all that concerned 
him; and I can add my attestation to that of Mr. Coleridge him- 
self, when describing an evening spent amongst the^ enlight- 
ened tradesmen of Birmingham, that nowhere is more 
unaffected good sense exhibited, and particularly nowhere more 
elasticity and freshness of mind, than in the conversation of the 
reading men in manufacturing towns. In Kendal, especially, 
in Bridgewater, and in Manchester, I have witnessed more 
interesting conversations, as much information, and more 
natural eloquence in conveying it than usually m literary cities, 
or in places professedly learned. One reason for this is, that m 
trading towns the time is more happily distributed; the day 
mven to business, and active duties — the evening to relaxa- 
tion- on which account, books, conversation, and literary leisure 
are more cordially enjoyed: the same satiation never can take 



302 DE QUINCEY 

place, which too frequently deadens the genial enjoyment of 
those who have a surfeit of books, and a monotony of leisure. 
Another reason is, that more simplicity of manner may be 
expected, and a more natural picturesqueness of conversation, 
more open expression of character in places, where people have 
no previous name to support. Men, in trading towns, are not 
afraid to open their lips, for fear they should disappoint your 
expectations, nor do they strain for showy sentiments, that they 
may meet them. But elsewhere, many are the men who stand 
in awe of their own reputation: not a word which is unstudied, 
not a movement in the spirit of natural freedom, dare they give 
way to; because it might happen that on review something 
would be seen to retract or to qualify — something not prop- 
erly planned and chiselled, to build into the general architec- 
ture of an artificial reputation. But to return : — 

Coleridge led me to a drawing-room, rang the bell for refresh- 
ments, and omitted no point of a courteous reception. He told 
me that there would be a very large dinner party on that day, 
which, perhaps, might be disagreeable to a perfect stranger; 
but, if not, he could assure me of a most hospitable welcome 
from the family. I was too anxious to see him under all 
aspects, to think of declining this invitation. And these little 
points of business being settled — Coleridge, like some great 
river, the Orellana, or the St. Lawrence, that had been checked 
and fretted by rocks or thwarting islands, and suddenly 
recovers its volume of waters, and its mighty music — swept 
at once, as if returning to his natural business, into a continu- 
ous strain of eloquent dissertation, certainly the most novel, 
the most finely illustrated, and traversing the most spacious 
fields of thought, by transitions the most just and logical, that 
it was possible to conceive. What I mean by saying that his 
transitions were " just," is by way of contradistinction to that 
mode of conversation which courts variety by means of verbal 
connections. Coleridge, to many people, and often I have 
heard the complaint, seemed to wander; and he seemed then to 
wander the most, when in fact his resistance to the wandering 
instinct was greatest, — viz. when the compass, and huge cir- 
ciiit, by which his illustrations moved, travelled farthest into 
remote regions, before they began to revolve. Long before 
this coming-round commenced, most people had lost him, and 
naturally enough supposed that he had lost himself. They 
continued to admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but 
did not see their relations to the dominant theme. Had the 
conversation been thrown upon paper, it might have been easy 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 303 

to trace the continuity of the links : just as in Bishop Berkeley's 
"Siris,"* from a pedestal so low and abject, so cuHnary, as Tar 
Water, the method of preparing it, and its medicinal effects, 
the dissertation ascends, like Jacob's ladder, by just gradations, 
into the Heaven of Heavens, and the thrones of the Trinity. 
But Heaven is there connected with earth by the Homeric chain 
of gold; and being subject to steady examination, it is easy to 
trace the links. Whereas, in conversation, the loss of a single 
word may cause the whole cohesion to disappear from view. 
However, I can assert, upon my long and intimate knowledge 
of Coleridge's mind, that logic, the most severe, was as inalien- 
able from his modes of thinking, as grammar from his 
language. 

On the present occasion, the original theme, started by 
myself, was Hartley, and the Hartleian theory. I had carried, 
as a little present to Coleridge, a scarce Latin pamphlet, " De 
Ideis," written by Hartley, about 1746, that is, about three years 
earlier than the publication of his great work. He had also 
preluded to this great work, in a little English medical tract 
upon Joanna Stephens's medicine for the stone; for indeed 
Hartley was the person upon whose evidence the House of 
Commons had mainly relied in giving to that same Joanna a 
reward of £5000 for her - idle medicines — an application of 
public money not without its use, in so far as it engaged men 
by selfish motives to cultivate the public service, and to attempt 
public problems of very difficult solution; but else, in that par- 
ticular instance, perfectly idle, as the groans of three genera- 
tions since Joanna's era have too feelingly established. It is 
known to most literary people that Coleridge was, in early life, 
so passionate an admirer of the Hartleian philosophy, that 
" Hartley '' was the sole baptismal name which he gave to his 
eldest child; and in an early poem, entitled "Religious Mus- 
ings," he has characterized Hartley as — 

"Him, 
Wisest of men, who saw the mimic trains 
Pass in fine surges to the sentient brain." 

But at present, (August, 1807,) all this was a forgotten thing. 
Coleridge was so profoundly ashamed of the shallow Unitarian- 
ism of Hartley, and so disgusted to think that he could at any 
time have countenanced that creed, that he would scarcely 
allow to Hartley the reverence which is undoubtedly his due: 
for I must contend that, waiving all question of the extent to 
which Hartley would have pushed it, (as though the law of 



304 DE QUINCEY 

association accounted not only for our complex pleasures and 
pains, but also might be made to explain the act of ratiocina- 
tion,) waiving also the physical substratum of nervous vibra- 
tions and miniature vibrations, to which he has chosen to marry 
his theory of association : — all this apart, I must contend that 
the " Essay on Man, His Frame, his Duty, and his Expecta- 
tions," stands forward as a specimen almost unique of elaborate 
theorizing, and a monument of absolute beauty, in the perfec- 
tion of its dialectic ability. In this respect it has, to my mind, 
the spotless beauty, and the ideal proportions of some Grecian 
statue. However, I confess, that being myself, from my 
earliest years, a reverential believer in the doctrine of the 
Trinity, simply because I never attempted to bring all things 
within the mechanic understanding, and because, like Sir 
Thomas Browne, my mind almost demanded mysteries, in so 
mysterious a system of relations as those which connect us with 
another world, and also because the farther my understanding 
opened, the more I perceived of dim analogies to strengthen 
my creed; and because nature herself, mere physical nature, 
has mysteries no less profound; and because the simplest doc- 
trine of motion rests upon an ultimate fact, which all the wis- 
dom of the schools will never explain; and because that vulgar 
puzzle of Achilles and the Tortoise never was and never will be 
cleared up,' and, finally, because I had begun to suspect (what 
afterwards Coleridge more fully convinced me of) that the 
unity demanded by the soi-disant Unitarian is a chimera and a 
total blunder, — being, in fact, not unity, but what the school- 
men call unicity; for, as they insist, without previous multitude 
(meaning by multitude simply plurality) there can be no proper 
unity; for, else, where is the union — where is the " To unitum? " 
For these and for many other " becauses," I could not recon- 
cile, with my general reverence for Mr. Coleridge, the fact so 
often reported to me, that he was a Unitarian. A Unitarian, I 
often exclaimed, and a philosopher! Nay, it cannot be denied, 
the profoundest of philosophers ! and one destined to sound the 
intellectual depths, and the depths below depths, beyond any 
other of the children of men. But, said some Bristol people 
to me, not only is he a Unitarian — he is also a Socinian. In 
that case, I replied, I cannot hold him a Christian. I am a 
liberal man, and have no bigotry or hostile feelings towards a 
Socinian; but I can never think that man a Christian, who has 
blotted out of his scheme the very powers by which only the 
great offices and functions of Christianity can be sustained; 
neither* can I think that any man, though he may make him- 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 305 

self a marvellously clever disputant, ever could toAver upwards 
into a very great philosopher, unless he should begin or should 
end with Christianity. Kant is a dubious exception. Not that 
I mean to question his august pretensions, so far as they went, 
and in his proper line. Within his own circle none durst tread 
but he. But that circle was limited. He was called, by one 
who weighed him well, the alles-zermalmender, the world-shat- 
tering Kant. He could destroy — his intellect was essentially 
destructive. He was the Gog and he was the Magog of Hunnish 
desolation to the existing schemes of philosophy. He probed 
them; he showed the vanity of vanities which besieged their 
foundations, — the rottenness below, the hollowness above. 
But he had no instincts of creation or restoration within his 
Apollyon mind; for he had no love, no faith, no self-distrust, 
no humility, no childlike docility; all which qualities belonged 
essentially to Coleridge's mind, and waited only for manhood 
and for sorrow to bring them forward. 

Who can read without indignation of Kant, that, at his own 
table, in social sincerity and confidential talk, let him say what 
he would in his books, he exulted in the prospect of absolute 
and ultimate annihilation; that he planted his glory in the grave, 
and was ambitious of rotting for ever! The King of Prussia, 
though a personal friend oi Kant's, found himself obliged to 
level his state thunders at some of his doctrines, and terrified 
him in his advance ; else, I am persuaded that Kant would have 
formally delivered Atheism from the Professor's chair, and 
would have enthroned the horrid Ghoulish creed, which pri- 
vately he professed, in the University of Konigsberg. It 
required the artillery of a great King to make him pause. The 
fact is, that as the stomach has been known, by means of its 
natural secretion, to attack not only whatsoever alien body is 
introduced within it, but also (as John Hunter first showed) 
sometimes to attack itself and its own organic structure; so, 
and with the same preternatural extension of instinct, did Kant 
carry forward his destroying functions, until he turned them 
upon his own hopes and the pledges of his own superiority to 
the dog — the ape — the worm. But " exoriare aliquis," — 
and some philosopher, I am persuaded, will yet arise; and 
"one sling of some victorious arm" will yet destroy the 
destroyer, in so far as he has applied himself to the destruc- 
tion of Christian hope. For my faith is, that, though a great 
man may, by a rare possibility, be an infidel, an intellect of the 
highest order must build upon Christianity. A very clever 
architect may choose to show his power by building witK suf- 



306 DE QUINCEY 

ficient materials, but the supreme architect must require the 
very best; because the perfection of the forms cannot be shown 
but in the perfection of the matter. 

On these accounts I took the Hberty of doubting, as often 
as I heard the reports I have mentioned of Coleridge; and I 
now found that he disowned most solemnly (and I may say 
penitentially) whatever had been true in these reports. Cole- 
ridge told me that it had cost him a painful effort, but not a 
moment's hesitation, to abjure his Unitarianism, from the cir- 
cumstance that he had amongst the Unitarians many friends, 
to some of whom he was greatly indebted for kind offices. In 
particular he mentioned Mr. Estlin of Bristol, I believe a dis- 
senting clergyman, as one whom it grieved him to grieve. But 
he would not dissemble his altered views. I will add, at the 
risk of appearing to dwell too long on religious topics, that on 
this my first introduction to Coleridge, he reverted with strong 
compunction to a sentiment which he had expressed in earlier 
days, upon prayer. In one of his youthful poems, speaking of 
God, he had said, — 

" Of whose all-seeing eye 
Aught to demand were impotence of mind." 

This sentiment he now so utterly condemned, that, on the con- 
trary, he told me, as his own peculiar opinion, that the act of 
praying was the very highest energy of which the human heart 
was capable ; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the 
faculties; and the great mass of worldly men and of learned 
men, he pronounced absolutely incapable of prayer. 

For about three hours he had continued to talk, and in the 
course of this performance he had delivered many most 
striking aphorisms, embalming more weight of truth, and sepa- 
rately more deserving to be themselves embalmed than any that 
are on record. In the midst of our conversation, if that can be 
called conversation which I so seldom sought to interrupt, and 
which did not often leave openings for contribution, the door 
opened, and a lady entered. She was in person full and rather 
below the common height: whilst her face showed, to my eye, 
some prettiness of rather a commonplace order. Coleridge 
turned, upon her entrance: his features, however, announced 
no particular complacency, and did not relax into a smile. In 
a frigid tone he said, whilst turning to me, "Mrs. Coleridge:" in 
some slight way he then presented me to her; I bowed; and the 
lady almost immediately retired. From this short, but ungenial 
scene, I gathered, what I afterward learned redundantly. 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 307 

that Coleridge's marriage had not been a very happy one. But 
let not the reader misunderstand me. Never was there a baser 
insinuation, viler in the motive, or more ignoble in the manner, 
than that passage in some lampoon of Lord Byron's, where, by 
way of vengeance on Mr. Southey, (who was the sole delin- 
quent,) he described both him and Coleridge as having married 
" two milliners from Bath." Everybody knows what is meant 
to be conveyed in that expression, though it would be hard 
indeed, if, even at Bath^ there should be any class under such a 
fatal curse, condemned so irretrievably, and so hopelessly pre- 
judged — that ignominy must, at any rate, attach, in virtue of 
a mere name or designation, to the mode by which they gained 
their daily bread, or possibly supported the declining years of a 
parent. However, in this case, the whole sting of the libel 
was a pure falsehood of Lord Byron's. Bath was not the 
native city, nor at any time the residence of the ladies in ques- 
tion, but Bristol. As to the other word, " milhners," that is not 
worth inquiring about. Whether they, or any one of their 
family, ever did exercise this profession, I do not know: they 
were at all events too young, when removed by marriage from 
Bristol, to have been much tainted by the worldly feelings 
which may beset such a mode of life. But what is more to the 
purpose, I heard at this time in Bristol, from Mr. Cottle the 
author, a man of high principle, from his accomplished sisters, 
from the ladies who had succeeded Mrs. Hannah More in her 
school, and who enjoyed her entire confidence, as well as from 
other most respectable residents at Bristol, who had passed 
their lives in that city, that the whole family of four or five 
sisters had maintained an irreproachable character, though 
naturally exposed by their personal attractions to some peril, 
and to the malevolence of envy. This declaration, which I 
could strengthen by other testimony equally disinterested, if it 
were at all necessary, I owe to truth ; and I must also add, upon 
a knowledge more personal, that Mrs. Coleridge was, in all 
circumstances of her married life, a virtuous wife, and a con- 
scientious mother; and as a mother, she showed at times a most 
meritorious energy: in particular, I remember that, wishing 
her daughter to acquire the Italian language, and having, in 
her retirement at Keswick, no means of obtaining a master, she 
set to work resolutely under Mr. Southey's guidance, to learn 
the language herself at a time of life when such attainments are 
not made with ease or pleasure: she became mistress of the 
language in a very respectable extent and then communicated 
her new accompHshment to her interesting daughter. 



308 DE QUINCEY 

Meantime, I, for my part, owe Mrs. Coleridge no particular 
civility: and I see no reason why I should mystify the account 
of Coleridge's life or habits, by dissembling what is notorious 
to so many thousands of people. An insult once offered by 
Mrs. Coleridge to a female relative of my own, as much 
superior to Mrs. Coleridge in the spirit of courtesy and kind- 
ness, which ought to preside in the intercourse between females, 
as she was in the splendour of her beauty, would have given me 
a dispensation from all terms of consideration beyond the 
restraints of strict justice. My offense was — the having procras- 
tinated in some trifling aflfair of returning a volume, or a manu- 
script; and during my absence at a distance of four or five hun- 
dred miles, Mrs. Coleridge thought lit to write a letter, filled 
with the most intemperate expressions of anger, addressed to 
one whom she did not know by sight, and who could in no 
way be answerable for my delinquencies. I go on, therefore, 
to say, that Coleridge afterwards made me, as doubtless some 
others, a confidant in this particular. What he had to com- 
plain of, was simply incompatibility of temper and disposition. 
Wanting all cordial admiration, or indeed comprehension of 
her husband's intellectual powers, Mrs. Coleridge wanted the 
original basis for affectionate patience and candour. Hearing 
from everybody that Coleridge was a man of most extraor- 
dinary endowments, and attaching little weight, perhaps, to the 
distinction between popular talents, and such as by their very 
nature are doomed to a slower progress in the public esteem, 
she naturally looked to see at least an ordinary measure of 
worldly consequence attend upon their exercise. 

Now had poor Coleridge been as persevering and punctual as 
the great mass of professional men, and had he given no reason 
to throw the onus of the different result upon his own different 
habits, — in that case this result might, possibly and eventually, 
have been set down to the peculiar constitution of his powers, 
and their essential non-popularity in the English market. 
But this trial having never fairly been made, it was natural to 
impute his non-success exclusively to his own irregular appli- 
cation and his carelessness in forming judicious connections. 
In circumstances such as these, however, no matter how caused, 
or how palliated, was laid a sure ground of discontent and fret- 
fulness in any woman's mind, not unusually indulgent, or 
unusually magnanimous. Coleridge, besides, assured me that 
his marriage was not his own deliberate act; but was in a man- 
ner forced upon his sense of honour, by the scrupulous Southey, 
who insisted that he had gone too far in his attentions to Miss 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 309 

Fricker, for any honourable retreat. On the other hand, a 
neutral spectator of the parties protested to me, that if ever in 
his life he had seen a man under deep fascination, and what he 
would have called desperately in love, Coleridge, in relation to 
Miss Fricker, was that man. Be that as it might, circum- 
stances occurred soon after the marriage, which placed all the 
parties in a trying situation for their candour and good temper. 
I had a full outline of the situation from two of those who were 
chiefly interested, and a partial one from a third : nor can it be 
denied that all the parties offended in point of prudence. A 
young lady became a neighbour, and a daily companion of Cole- 
ridge's walks, whom I will not describe more particularly, than 
by saying that intellectually she was very much superior to 
Mrs. Coleridge. That superiority alone_, when made conspicu- 
ous by its effect in winning Coleridge's regard and society, 
could not but be deeply mortifying to a young wife. However, 
it was moderated to her feelings by two considerations, — first. 
That the young lady was much too kind-hearted to have 
designed any annoyance in this triumph, or to express any 
exultation; second, That no shadow of suspicion settled upon the 
moral conduct or motives of either party: the young lady was 
always attended by her brother: she had no personal charms; 
and it was manifest that mere intellectual sympathies, in refer- 
ence to literature and natural scenery, had associated them in 
their daily walks. 

Still it is a bitter trial to a young married woman to sustain 
any sort of competition with a female of her own age, for any 
part of her husband's regard, or any share of his company. 
Mrs. Coleridge, not having the same relish for long walks or 
rural scenery, and their residence being, at this time, in a very 
sequestered village, was condemned to a daily renewal of this 
trial. Accidents of another kind embittered it still further: 
often it would happen that the walking party returned drenched 
with rain ; in which case the young lady, with a laughing gayety, 
and evidently unconscious of any liberty that she was taking, 
or any wound that she was inflicting, would run up to Mrs. 
Coleridge's wardrobe, array herself, without leave asked, in 
Mrs. Coleridge's dresses, and make herself merry with her own 
unceremoniousness and Mrs. Coleridge's gravity. In all this, 
she took no liberty that she would not most readily have 
granted in return; she confided too unthinkingly in what she 
regarded as the natural privileges of friendship; and as little 
thought that she had been receiving or exacting a favour, as, 
under an exchange of their relative positions, she would have 



310 DE QUINCEY 

claimed to have conferred one. But Mrs. Coleridge viewed 
her freedoms with a far different eye: she felt herself no longer 
the entire mistress of her own house; she held a divided 
empire; and it barbed the arrow to her womanly feelings, that 
Coleridge treated any sallies of resentment which might some- 
times escape her, as narrow-mindedness: whilst, on the other 
hand, her own female servant, and others in the same rank of 
life, began to drop expressions, which alternately implied pity 
for her as an injured woman, or sneered at her as a very tame 
one. 

The reader will easily apprehend the situation, and the unfor- 
tunate results which it boded to the harmony of a young mar- 
ried couple, without further illustration. Whether Coleridge 
would not, under any circumstances, have become indifferent 
to a wife not eminently capable of enlightened sympathy with 
his own ruling pursuits, I shall not undertake to guess. But 
doubtless this consummation must have been hastened by a 
situation which exposed Mrs. Coleridge to an invidious com- 
parison with a more intellectual person; as, on the other hand, 
it was most unfortunate for Coleridge himself, to be continu- 
ally compared with one so ideally correct and regular in his 
business habits as Mr. Southey. Thus was their domestic 
peace prematurely soured: embarrassments of a pecuniary 
nature would be likely to demand continual sacrifices ; no depth 
of affection existing, these would create disgust or dissension; 
and at length, each would believe that their union had originated 
in circumstances overruling their own deliberate choice. 

The gloom, how^ever, and the weight of dejection which sat 
upon Coleridge's countenance and deportment at this time, 
could not be accounted for by a disappointment, (if such it 
were,) to which time must, long ago, have reconciled him. 
Mrs. Coleridge, if not turning to him the more amiable aspects 
of her character, was, at any rate, a respectable partner. And 
the season of youth was now passed. They had been married 
about ten years; had had four children, of whom three sur- 
vived; and the interests of a father were now replacing those of 
a husband. Yet never had I beheld so profound an expression 
of cheerless despondency. And the restless activity of Cole- 
ridge's mind in chasing abstract truths, and burying himself in 
the dark places of human speculation, seemed to me, in a great 
measure, an attempt to escape out of his own personal wretch- 
edness. At dinner, when a very numerous party had assem- 
bled, he knew that he was expected to talk, and exerted himself 
to meet the expectation. But he was evidently struggling with 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 3I I 

Hoomy thoughts that prompted him to silence, and perhaps to 
soHtude: he talked with effort; and passively resigned himself 
to the repeated misrepresentations of several amongst his 
hearers. It must be to this period of Coleridge's life that 
Wordsworth refers in those exquisite "Lines written in my 
pocket-copy of the Castle of Indolence." The passage which I 
mean comes after a description of Coleridge's countenance, and 
begins in some such terms as these: 

" A piteous sight it was to see this man, ^^ 

When he came back to us, a wither'd flow'r. 

Withered he was indeed, and to all appearance blighted. At 
night he entered into a spontaneous explanation of this 
unhappy overclouding of his life, on occasion of my saying 
accidentally that a tooth-ache had obliged me to take a few 
drops of laudanum. At what time or on what motive he had 
commenced the use of opium, he did not say; but the peculiar 
emphasis of horror with which he warned me against forming 
a habit of the same kind, impressed upon my mind a feeling 
that he never hoped to liberate himself from the bondage. 
About ten o'clock at night I took leave of him; and feeling 
that I could not easily go to sleep after the excitement of the 
day and fresh from the sad spectacle of powers so majestic 
already besieged by decay, I determined to return to Bristol 
through the coolness of the night. The roads, though, in fact, 
a section of the great highway between seaports so turbulent 
as Bristol and Plymouth, were as quiet as garden-walks. 
Once only I passed through the expiring fires of a village fair 
or wake: that interruption excepted, through the whole stretch 
of forty miles from Bridgewater to the Hot-wells, I saw no 
living creature, but a surly dog, who followed me for a mile 
alon^ a park wall, and a man who was moving about in the 
half-way town of Cross. The turnpike gates were all opened 
by a mechanical contrivance from a bed-room window; i 
seemed to myself in solitary possession of the whole sleeping 
country: — the summer night was divinely calm; no sound, 
except once or twice the cry of a child as I was passing the 
windows of cottages, ever broke upon the utter silence; and all 
things conspired to throw back my thoughts upon the extraor- 
dinary person whom I had quitted. 

The fine saying of Addison is familiar to most readers,-- that 
Babylon in ruins is not so affecting a spectacle, or so solemn, 
as a human mind overthrown by lunacy. How much more 
awful then, and more magnificent a wreck, when a mind so 



312 DE QUINCEY 

regal as that of Coleridge is overthrown or threatened with 
overthrow, not by a visitation of Providence, but by the 
treachery of his own will, and the conspiracy as it were of him- 
self against himself! Was it possible that this ruin had been 
caused or hurried forward by the dismal degradations of 
pecuniary difficulties? That was worth inquiring. I will here 
mention briefly that I did inquire two days after; and in conse- 
quence of what I heard, I contrived that a particular service 
should be tendered to Mr. Coleridge, a week after, through the 
hands of Mr. Cottle of Bristol, which might have the effect of 
liberating his mind from anxiety for a year or two, and thus 
rendering his great powers disposable to their natural uses. 
Tliat service was accepted by Coleridge. To save him any 
feelings of distress, all names were concealed; but in a letter 
written by him, about fifteen years after this time, I found that 
he had become aware of all the circumstances, perhaps through 
some indiscretion of Mr. Cottle's. A more important question 
I never ascertained — viz. whether this service had the efifect 
of seriously lightening his mind. For some succeeding years 
he did certainly appear to me released from that load of 
despondency which oppressed him on my first introduction. 
Grave, indeed, he continued to be, and at times absorbed in 
gloom; nor did I ever see him in a state of perfectly natural 
cheerfulness. But as he strove in vain, for many years, to 
wean himself from his captivity to opium, a healthy state of 
spirits could not be much expected. Perhaps, indeed, where 
the liver and other organs had, for so large a period in life, 
been subject to a continual morbid stimulation, it may be 
impossible for the system ever to recover a natural .action. 
Torpor, I suppose, must result from continued artificial excite- 
ment; and, perhaps, upon a scale of corresponding duration. 
Life, in such a case, may not ofifer a field of sufficient extent 
for unthreading the fatal links that have been wound about the 
machinery of health, and have crippled its natural play. 
Meantime, — to resume the thread of my wandering narrative, 
— on this serene summer night of 1807, as I moved slowly 
along, with my eyes continually settling upon the Northern 
constellations, which, like all the fixed stars, by their immeasur- 
able and almost spiritual remoteness from human afifairs, 
naturally throw the thoughts upon the perishableness of our 
earthly troubles, in contrast with their own utter peace and 
solemnity, — I reverted, at intervals, to all I had ever heard of 
Coleridge, and strove to weave it into some continuous sketch 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 3 1 3 

of his life. I hardly remember how much I then knew ; I know 
but little now — that little I will here jot down upon paper. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the son of a learned clergy- 
man, the vicar of Ottery St. Mary, in the southern quarter of 
Devonshire. It is painful to mention that he was almost an 
object of persecution to his mother; why, I could never learn. 
His father was described to me, by Coleridge himself, as a sort 
of Parson Adams, being distinguished by his erudition, his 
inexperience of the world, and his guileless simplicity. I once 
purchased in London, and, I suppose, still possess, two ele- 
mentary books on the Latin language by this reverend gentle- 
man; one of them, as I found, making somewhat higher pre- 
tensions than a common school grammar. In particular, an 
attempt is made to reform the theory of the cases ; and it gives 
a pleasant specimen of the rustic scholar's naivete, that he seri- 
ously proposes to banish such vexatious terms as the accusa- 
tive; and, by way of simplifying the matter to tender minds, 
that we should call it, in all time to come, the " quale-quare- 
quidditive " case, upon what incomprehensible principle I never 
could fathom. He used regularly to delight his village flock, 
on Sundays, with Hebrew quotations in his sermons, which he 
always introduced as the " immediate language of the Holy 
Ghost." This proved unfortunate to his successor; he also was 
a learned man, and his parishioners admitted it, but generally 
with a sigh for past times, and a sorrowful complaint that he 
was still far below Parson Coleridge — for that he never gave 
them any " immediate language of the Holy Ghost." I 
presume, that, like the reverend gentleman so pleasantly 
sketched in " St. Ronan's Well," Mr. Coleridge, who resem- 
bled that person in his Oriental learning and his simplicity, 
must also have resembled him in short-sightedness, of which 
his son used to relate a ludicrous instance. Dining in a large 
party, one day, the modest divine was suddenly shocked by 
perceiving some part, as he conceived, of his own snowy shirt 
emerging from a part of his habiliments, which we shall sup- 
pose to have been his waistcoat. It was not that; but for 
decorum we shall so call it. The stray portion of his supposed 
tunic was admonished of its errors by a forcible thrust back 
into its proper home; but still another limbus persisted to 
emerge, or seemed to persist, and still another, until the learned 
gentleman absolutely perspired with the labour of re-establish- 
ing order. And, after all, he saw with anguish, that some 
arrears of the snowy indecorum still remained to reduce into 
obedience. To this remnant of rebellion he was proceeding to 



314 DE QUINCEY 

apply himself — strangely confounded, however, at the obstinacy 
of the insurrection — when the mistress of the house, rising to 
lead away the ladies from the table, and all parties naturally 
rising with her, it became suddenly apparent to every eye, that 
the worthy Orientalist had been most laboriously stowing away, 
into the capacious receptacles of his own habiliments, the 
snowy folds of a lady's gown, belonging to his next neighbour; 
and so voluminously, that a very small portion of it, indeed, 
remained for the lady's own use; the natural consequence of 
which was, of course, that the lady appeared almost inextricably 
yoked to the learned theologian, and could not in any way 
effect her release, until after certain operations upon the Vicar's 
dress, and a continued refunding and rolling out of snowy 
mazes upon snowy mazes, in quantities which, at length, proved 
too much for the gravity of the company. Inextinguishable 
laughter arose from all parties, except the erring and unhappy 
doctor, who, in dire perplexity, continued still refunding with 
all his might, until he had paid up the last arrears of his long 
debt, and thus put an end to a case of distress more memorable 
to himself and his parishioners, than any " quale-quare-quiddi- 
tive " case that probably had ever perplexed his learning. 

In his childish days, and when he had become an orphan, 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was removed to the heart of 
London, and placed on the great foundation of Christ's 
Hospital. He there found himself associated, as a school- 
fellow, with several boys destined to distinction in after 
life, and especially with one who, if not endowed with 
powers equally large and comprehensive, had, how- 
ever, genius not less original or exquisite than his 
own — the inimitable Charles Lamb. But, in learning, Coler- 
idge outstripped all competitors, and rose to be the Captain of 
the school. It is indeed a most memorable fact to be recorded 
of a boy, that, before completing his fifteenth year, he had trans- 
lated the Greek Hymns of Synesius into English anacreontic 
verse. This was not a school task, but a labour of love and 
choice; to appreciate which, it is necessary to recall the dark 
philosophy which constitutes the theme of Synesius. Before 
leaving school, Coleridge had an opportunity of reading the 
sonnets of Bowles, which so powerfully impressed his poetic 
sensibility, that he made forty transcripts of them with his 
own pen, by way of presents to youthful friends. From 
Christ's Hospital, by the privilege of his station at school, he 
was transferred to Jesus College, Cambridge. It was here, 
no doubt, that his acquaintance began with the philosophic 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 3 1 5 

system of Hartley, for that eminent person had been a Jesus 
man. Frend also, the mathematician, of heretical memory, 
belonged to, that College, and was probably contemporary with 
Coleridge. What accident, or imprudence, carried him away 
from Cambridge before he had completed the usual period of 
study, or (I believe) taken his degree, I never heard. He had 
certainly won some distinction as a scholar, having obtained 
the prize for a Greek ode in Sapphic metre, of which the senti- 
ments (as he observes himself) were better than the Greek. 
Porson was accustomed, meanly enough, to ridicule the Greek 
lexis of this ode, which was to break a fly upon the wheel. The 
ode was clever enough for a boy; but to such skill in Greek as 
could have enabled him to compose with critical accuracy, 
Coleridge never made pretensions. He had, however, a far 
more philosophic insight into much of the structure of that 
language than Porson had, or could have comprehended. 

The incidents of Coleridge's life about this period, and some 
account of a heavy disappointment in love, which probably it 
was that carried him away from Cambridge, are to be found 
embodied (with what modifications I know not) in the novel 
of " Edmund Oliver," written by the late Charles Lloyd. It is 
well known that, in a frenzy of unhappy feeling at the rejection 
he met with from the lady of his choice, Coleridge enlisted as 
a private in a dragoon regiment. He fell off his horse on 
several occasions, but, perhaps, not more than raw recruits are 
apt to do when first put under the riding-master. But Coler- 
idge was naturally ill framed for a good horseman. He is also 
represented in "Edmund Oliver," as having found peculiar diffi- 
culty or annoyance in grooming his horse. But the most 
romantic incident in that scene of his life was in the circum- 
stances of his discharge. It is said (but I vouch for no part of 
the story) that Coleridge, as a private, mounted guard at the 
door of a room in which his officers happened to give a ball. 
Two of them had a dispute upon some Greek word or passage 
when close to Coleridge's station. He interposed his authentic 
decision of the case. The officers started as though one of 
their own horses had sung "Rule Britannia;" questioned him; 
heard his story; pitied his misfortunes; and, finally, subscribed 
to purchase his discharge. Not very long after this, Coleridge 
became acquainted with the two Wedgwoods, both of whom, 
admiring his fine powers, subscribed to send him into North 
Germany, where, at the university of Gottingen, he completed 
his education according to his own scheme. The most cele- 
brated professor whose lectures he attended, was the far-famed 



3l6 DE QUINCEY 

Blumenbach, of whom he continued to speak through Hfe with 
almost filial reverence. Returning to England, he attended Mr. 
Thomas Wedgwood, as a friend, throughout the afflicting and 
anomalous illness which brought him to the grave. It was 
supposed by medical men that the cause of Mr. Wedgwood's 
continued misery was a stricture of some part in the intestines 
(the colon, it was believed). The external symptoms were 
torpor and defective irritability, together with everlasting rest- 
lessness. By way of some relief to this latter symptom, Mr. 
Wedgwood purchased a travelling carriage, and wandered up 
and down England, taking Coleridge as his companion. And, 
as a desperate attempt to rouse and irritate the decaying sensi- 
bility of his system, I have been assured by a surviving friend, 
that Mr. Wedgwood at one time opened a butcher's shop, con- 
ceiving that the affronts and disputes to which such a situation 
would expose him, might act beneficially upon his increasing 
torpor. This strange expedient* served only to express the 
anguish which had now mastered his nature: it was soon 
abandoned; and this accomplished but miserable man soon 
sank under his sufiferings. What made the case more memor- 
able was the combination of worldly prosperity which had 
settled upon this gentleman. He was rich, young, generally 
beloved, distinguished for his scientific attainments, publicly 
honoured for patriotic services, and had before him, when he 
first fell ill, every prospect of a splendid and most useful career. 
By the death of Mr. Wedgwood, Coleridge succeeded to a 
regular annuity of £75, which that gentleman had bequeathed 
to him. The other Mr. Wedgwood granted him an equal 
allowance. Now came his marriage, his connection with poli- 
tics and political journals, his residence in various parts of 
Somersetshire, and his consequent introduction to Mr. Words- 
worth. In his politics, Mr. Coleridge was most sincere and 
most enthusiastic. No man hailed with profounder sympathy 
the French Revolution; and though he saw cause to withdraw 
his regard from many of the democratic zealots in this country, 
and even from the revolutionary intereat as it was subsequently 
conducted, he continued to worship the original revolutionary 
cause in a pure Miltonic spirit; and he continued also to abom- 
inate the policy of Mr. Pitt in a degree which I myself find it 
difficult to understand. The very spirited little poem of " Fire, 
Famine, and Slaughter," who are supposed to meet in confer- 
ence, to describe their horrid triumphs, and then to ask in a 
whisper who it was that unchained them, to which each in 
turn replies, 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 317 

" Letters four do form his name! " 

expresses his horror of Mr. Pitt personally in a most extrava- 
gant shape, but merely for the purpose of poetic effect; for he 
had no real unkindness in his heart towards any human bemg; 
and I have often heard him disclaim the hatred which is here 
expressed for Mr. Pitt, as he did also very elaborately and 
earnestly in print. Somewhere about this time, Coleridge 
attempted, under Sheridan's countenance, to bring a tragedy 
upon the stage of Drury Lane; but his prospect of success, as I 
once heard or read, was suddenly marred by Mr. Sheridan's 
inability to sacrifice what he thought a good jest. One scene 
presented a cave with streams of water weeping down the 
sides; and the first words were, in a sort of mimicry of the 
sound, "Drip, drip, drip!" Upon which Sheridan repeated 
aloud, "Drip, drip, drip !— why, God bless me, there's nothing 
here but dripping;" and so arose a chorus of laughter amongst 
the actors fatal to the probationary play. 

Notes 

*I forget the exact title, not having seen the book since 1823, and 
then only for a day; but I believe it was " Schelhng s Klenie Philo- 
sophische Werke/' . , . ^ , i, • r..^^ 

= " Seiris " ought to have been the title, 1. e., :2eipiZ a chain, from 
this defect in the orthography, I did not in my boyish days perceive, 
nor could obtain any light upon its meaning ,v, ^ o rr,,rcfprv 

«- So cleared up, I mean, as to make it other than a mystery. 
Else, in a sense, which, leaving a great mystery behind, clears it of 
contradiction, it was solved satisfactorily to my mind by Mr. Coler- 
idge - I believe in print; but at any rate m conversation I had 
remarked to him that the " sophism," as it is usually called, but the 
d!ffi?ulty as it should be called, of Achilles and the Tortoise, which 
had puzzled all the sages of Greece, was, in ^ft, merely another 
form of the perplexity which besets decima fractions - that, for 
examp?e, \i yoS throw % into a decimal form, it will never terminate 
but be .666666, etc., ad infinitum.^ " Yes," Coleridge ^^p f d: The 
apparent absurdity in the Grecian problem arises th^s- because 
it assumes the infinite divisibility of space, but drops out of view the 
co?espSiding infinity of time." There was a flash of lightning which 
illuminated I darkness that had existed for twenty-three centuries! 

'' Which however, his brother denied as a pure fable. On reading 
this account, he wrote to me, and in very courteous ternis assured 
me that I had been misinformed. I now retain the story simply as a 
Version, partially erroneous, no doubt, of perhaps some true anecdote 
Ihlt may have escaped the surviving Mr. Wedgwood's knowledge; 
my reason for thinking thus being, that the same anecdote essentially 
but varied in the circumstances, has reached me at different periods 
from parties having no connection whatsoever. 



II 

ABOUT the latter end of the century, Coleridge visited 
North Germany again, in company with Mr. and Miss 
Wordsworth. Their tour was chiefly confined to the 
Hartz forest and its neighbourhood. But the incident 
most worthy of remembrance in their excursion, was a visit 
made to Klopstock; whom they found either at Hamburg or, 
perhaps, at the Danish town (as then it was) of Altona; for 
Klopstock was a pensioner of the Danish king. An anony- 
mous writer, who attacked Coleridge most truculently in an 
early number of " Blackwood," and with an acharnement that 
must astonish those who knew its object, has made the mistake 
of supposing Coleridge to have been the chief speaker, who did 
not speak at all. The case was this: Klopstock could 
not speak English, though everybody remembers the pretty 
broken English of his second wife. Neither Coleridge nor 
Wordsworth, on the other hand, spoke German with any 
fluency. French, therefore, was the only medium of free com- 
munication; that being pretty equally familiar to Wordsworth 
and to Klopstock. But Coleridge found so much difficulty even 
in reading French, that, wherever (as in the case of Leibnitz's 
"Theodicee") there was a choice between an original written in 
French and a translation, though it might be a very faulty one, 
in German, he always preferred the latter. Hence, it happened 
that Wordsworth, on behalf of the English party, was the sole 
supporter of the dialogue. The anonymous critic says another 
thing, which certainly has an air of truth, viz. that Klopstock 
plays a very secondary role in the interview (or words to that 
effect). But how was that to be avoided in reporting the case, 
supposing the fact to have been such? Now the plain truth is, 
that Wordsworth, upon his own ground, is an incomparable 
talker; whereas, Klubstick (as Coleridge used to call him) was 
always a feeble and careless one. Besides, he was now old and 
decaying. Nor at any time, nor in any accomplishment, could 
Klopstock have shone, unless in the noble art of skating. 
Wordsworth did the very opposite of that with which he was 
taxed; for, happening to look down at Klopstock's swollen 
legs, and recollecting his age, he felt touched by a sort of filial 

318 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 319 

pity for his helplessness. And upon another principle, which, 
in my judgment, Wordsworth is disposed to carry too far, viz. 
the forbearance and the ceremonious caution which he habitu- 
ally concedes to an established reputation, even where he 
beHeves it to have been built on a hollow foundation, — he 
came to the conclusion, that it would not seem becoming in a 
young, and as yet obscure author, to report faithfully the real 
superiority he too easily maintained in such a colloquy. 

But neither had Klopstock the pretensions as a poet, which 
the " Blackwood " writer seems to take for granted. Germany, 
the truth is, wanted a great Epic poet. Not having produced 
one in that early condition of her literary soil when such a 
growth is natural and favoured by circumstances, the next 
thing was to manufacture a substitute. The force of Coler- 
idge's well known repartee — when, in reply to a foreigner 
asserting that Klopstock was the German Milton, he said, 
"True, sir; a very German Milton," — cannot be fully appreci- 
ated but by one who is familiar with the German poetry, and 
the small proportion in which it is a natural and spontaneous 
product. It has been often noticed, as the misfortune of the 
Roman literature, that it grew up too much under the oppres- 
sion of Grecian models, and of Grecian models depraved by 
Alexandrian art; a fact, so- far as it was a fact, which crippled 
the genial and characteristic spirit of the national mind. But 
this evil, after all, did not take effect except in a partial sense. 
Rome had cast much of her literature in her own moulds before 
these exotic models had begun to domineer. Not so with Ger- 
many. Her literature, since its revival in the last century (and 
the revival upon the impulse of what cattle! — Bodmer on the 
one hand, and Gottsched on the other!) has hardly moved a 
step in the freedom of natural grace. England for nineteen, 
and France for the twentieth of all her capital works, has given 
the too servile law: and with regard to Klopstock, if ever there 
was a good exemplification of the spurious and the counterfeit 
in Hterature, seek it in the " Messiah." He is verily and indeed 
the Birmingham Milton. This Klopstockian dialogue, by the 
way, was first printed (hardly published) in the original, or 
Lake edition of " The Friend." In the recast of that work it 
was omitted: nor has it been printed anywhere else that I am 
aware of. 

About the close of the first revolutionary war it must have 
been, or in the brief interval of peace, that Coleridge resorted 
to the English Lakes as a place of residence. Wordsworth had 
a natural connection with that region by birth, breeding, and 



320 DE QUINCE Y 

family alliances. Wordsworth attracted Coleridge to the 
Lakes; and Coleridge, through his affinity to Southey, eventu- 
ally attracted him, Southey, as is known to all who take an 
interest in the Lake colony, married a sister of Mrs. Coler- 
idge's: and as a singular eccentricity in the circumstances of 
that marriage, I may mention, that, on his wedding day, (at 
the very portico of the church, I have been told,) Southey left 
his bride, to embark for Lisbon. His uncle. Dr. Herbert, was 
chaplain to the English factory in that city ; and it was to benefit 
by the facilities in that way opened to him for seeing Portugal 
that Southey now went abroad. He extended his tour to 
Spain; and the result of his notices was communicated to the 
world in a volume of travels. By such accidents of personal 
or family connection as I have mentioned, was the Lake colony 
gathered ; and the critics of the day, unaware of the real facts, 
supposed them to have assembled under common views in 
literature — particularly with regard to the true functions of 
poetry, and the true theory of poetic diction. Under this 
original blunder, laughable it is to mention, that they went on 
to find in their writings all the agreements and common char- 
acteristics which their blunder had presumed: and they incor- 
porated the whole community under the name of the Lake 
School. Yet Wordsworth and Southey never had one prin- 
ciple in common. Indeed, Southey troubled himself little 
about abstract principles in anything ; and so far from agreeing 
with Wordsworth to the extent of setting up a separate school 
in poetry, he told me himself (August, 1812), that he highly 
disapproved both of Mr. Wordsworth's theories and of his prac- 
tice. It is very true, that one man may sympathize with 
another, or even follow his leading, unconscious that he does 
so ; or he may go so far as, in the very act of virtual imitation, 
to deem himself in opposition; but this sort of blind agreement 
could hardly be supposed of two men as discerning and as self- 
examining as Wordsworth and Southey. And, in fact, a 
philosophic investigation of the difficult questions connected 
with this whole slang about schools, Lake schools, etc., would 
show that Southey has not, nor ever had, any peculiarities in 
common with Wordsworth, beyond that of exchanging the old 
prescriptive diction of poetry, introduced between the periods 
of Milton and Cowper, for the simpler and profounder forms of 
daily life in some instances, and of the Bible in others. The 
bold and uniform practice of Wordsworth was here adopted 
timidly by Southey. In this respect, however, Cowper had 
already begun the reform; and his influence, concurring with 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 32 1 

the now larger influence of Wordsworth, has operated so 
extensively, as to make their own original differences at this day 
less perceptible. 

By the way, the word colony, reminds me that I have omitted 
to mention, in its proper place, some scheme for migrating to 
America, which had been entertained by Coleridge and Southey 
about the year 1794-95, under the learned name of Pantiso- 
cracy. So far as I ever heard, it differed little, except in its 
Grecian name, from any other scheme for mitigating the priva- 
tions of a wilderness by settling in a cluster of families bound 
together by congenial tastes and uniform principles, rather 
than in self-depending, insulated households. Steadily pur- 
sued, it might, after all, have been a fortunate plan for Coler- 
idge. " Soliciting my food from daily toil," a line in which 
Coleridge alludes to the scheme, implies a condition that would 
have upheld Coleridge's health and happiness, somewhat better 
than the habits of luxurious city life as now constituted in 
Europe. To return to the Lakes, and to the Lake colony of 
poets: So little were Southey and Wordsworth connected by 
any personal intercourse in those days, and so little disposed to 
be connected, that, whilst the latter had a cottage in Grasmere, 
Southey pitched his tent at Greta Hall, on a little eminence 
rising immediately from the romantic river Greta and the town 
of Keswick. Grasmere is in Westmoreland; Keswick in Cum- 
berland; and they are thirteen good miles apart. Coleridge 
and his family were domiciliated in Greta Hall, sharing that 
house, a tolerably large one, on some principle of amicable 
division, with Mr. Southey. But Coleridge personally was 
more often to be found at Grasmere — which presented the 
threefold attractions of loveliness so complete, as to eclipse 
even the scenery of Derwentwater; a pastoral state of society, 
free from the deformities of a little town like Keswick; and, 
finally, the society of Wordsworth. Not before 181 5, or 1816, 
could it be said that Southey and Wordsworth were even upon 
friendly terms: so entirely is it untrue that they combined to 
frame a school of poetry. Up to that time, they viewed each 
other with mutual respect, but also with mutual dislike ; almost 
I might say, with mutual disgust. Wordsworth disliked in 
Southey the want of depth, as regards the power of philosophic 
abstraction, of comprehensive views, and of severe principles 
of thought. Southey disliked in Wordsworth the air of dog- 
matism, and the unaffable haughtiness of his manner. Other 
more trivial reasons combined with these. 

At this time, when Coleridge first settled at the Lakes, or 

21 



322 DE QUINCEY 

not long after, a romantic and somewhat tragical affair drew 
the eyes of all England, and, for many years, continued to draw 
the steps of tourists, to one of the most secluded Cumberland 
valleys, so little visited previously, that it might be described 
almost as an undiscovered chamber of that romantic district. 
Coleridge was brought into a closer connection with this affair 
than merely by the general relation of neighbourhood; for an 
article of his in a morning paper, I believe, unintentionally fur- 
nished the original clew for unmasking the base impostor who 
figured as the foremost actor in this tale. Other generations 
have arisen since that time, who must naturally be unacquainted 
with the circumstances; and, on their account, I shall here 
recall them. One day in the Lake season, there drove up to 
the Royal Oak, the principal inn at Keswick, a handsome and 
well-appointed travelling carriage, containing one gentleman 
of somewhat dashing exterior. The stranger was a pictur- 
esque-hunter, but not of that order who fly round the ordinary 
tour with the velocity of lovers posting to Gretna, or of crim- 
inals running from the police; his purpose was to domiciliate 
himself in this beautiful scenery, and to see it at his leisure. 
From Keswick, as his head-quarters, he made excursions in 
every direction amongst the neighbouring valleys ; meeting gen- 
erally a good deal of respect and attention, partly on account 
of his handsome equipage, and still more from his visiting 
cards, which designated him as The " Hon. Augustus Hope." 
Under this name, he gave himself out for a brother of Lord 
Hopetoun's, whose great income was well known, and, per- 
haps, exaggerated amongst the dalesmen of northern England. 
Some persons had discernment enough to doubt of this; for 
the man's breeding and deportment, though showy, had a 
tang of vulgarity about it; and Coleridge assured me, that he 
was grossly ungrammatical in his ordinary conversation. 
However, one fact, soon dispersed by the people of a little 
rustic post-office, laid asleep all demurs; he not only received 
letters addressed to him under this assumed name — that might 
be through collusion with accomplices — but he himself con- 
tinually franked letters by that name. Now, that being a 
capital offence, being not only a forgery, but, (as a forgery on 
the Post-office,) sure to be prosecuted, nobody presumed to 
question his pretensions any longer; and, henceforward, he 
went to all places with the consideration attached to an EarPs 
brother. All doors flew open at his approach ; boats, boatmen, 
nets, and the most unlimited sporting privileges, were placed 
at the disposal of the " Honourable " gentleman : and the hospi- 




NAB COTTAGE, ON RYDAL WATER, 
The cottage De Quincey loaned to Coleridge, 

Photogravure from an old print. 



every 



brotht 




-x^ 






SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 323 

tality of the whole country taxed itself to offer a suitable recep- 
tion to the patrician Scotsman. It could be no blame to a 
shepherd girl, bred in the sternest solitude which England has 
to show, that she should fall into a snare which hardly any of 
her betters had escaped. Nine miles from Keswick, by the 
nearest bridle-road, but fourteen or fifteen by any route which 
the honourable gentleman's travelling carriage could have tra- 
versed, lies the Lake of Buttermere. Its margin, which is over- 
hung by some of the loftiest and steepest of the Cumbrian 
mountains, exhibits on either side few traces of human neigh- 
bourhood; the level area, where the hills recede enough to allow 
of any, is of a wild pastoral character, or almost savage; the 
waters of the lake are deep and sullen; and the barrier moun- 
tains, by excluding the sun for much of his daily course, 
strengthen the gloomy impressions. At the foot of this lake 
(that is, at the end where its waters issue) lie a few unorna- 
mented fields, through which rolls a little brook-like river 
connecting it with the larger Lake of Crummock; and at the 
edge of this miniature domain, upon the roadside, stands a 
cluster of cottages, so small and few that, in the richer tracts of 
the islands, they would scarcely be complimented with the name 
of hamlet. One of these, and I believe the principal, belonged 
to an independent proprietor, called, in the local dialect, a 
" Statesman ; " ^ and more, perhaps, for the sake of gathering 
any little local news, than with much view to pecuniary profit 
at that era, this cottage offered the accommodations of an inn 
to the traveller and his horse. Rare, however, must have been 
the mounted traveller in those days, unless visiting Buttermere 
for itself and as a terminus ad quem; for the road led to no 
further habitation of man, with the exception of some four or 
five pastoral cabins, equally humble, in Gatesgarth Dale. 

Hither, however, in an evil hour for the peace of this Httle 
brotherhood of shepherds, came the cruel spoiler from Kes- 
wick. His errand was, to witness or to share in the char- 
fishing; for in Derwentwater (the Lake of Keswick) no char is 
found, which breeds only in the deeper waters, such as Winder- 
mere, Crummock, Buttermere, etc. But whatever had been 
his first object, that was speedily forgotten in one more deeply 
interesting. The daughter of the house, a fine young woman 
of eighteen, acted as waiter."" In a situation so solitary, the 
stranger had unlimited facilities for enjoying her company, and 
recommending himself to her favour. Doubts about his preten- 
sions never arose in so simple a place as this; they were over- 
ruled before they could well have arisen, by the opinion now 



324 DE QUINCEY 

general in Keswick that he really was what he pretended to be: 
and thus, with little demur except in the shape of a few natural 
words of parting anger from a defeated or rejected rustic 
admirer, the young woman gave her hand in marriage to the 
showy and unprincipled stranger. I know not whether the 
marriage was, or could have been celebrated in the little moun- 
tain chapel of Buttermere. If it were, I persuade myself that 
the most hardened villain must have felt a momentary pang on 
violating the altar of such a chapel, so touchingly does it 
express, by its miniature dimensions, the almost helpless 
humility of that little pastoral community to whose spiritual 
wants it has from generation to generation administered. It 
is not only the very smallest chapel by many degrees in all 
England, but is so mere a toy in outward appearance, that, 
were it not for its antiquity, its wild mountain exposure, and 
its consecrated connection with the final hopes and fears of the 
adjacent pastoral hamlet — but for these considerations, the 
first movement of a stranger's feelings would be towards loud 
laughter; for the little chapel looks not so much a mimic chapel 
in a drop scene from the Opera House, as a miniature copy 
from such a scene; and evidently could not receive within its 
walls more than a half dozen of households. From this sanctu- 
ary it was — from beneath the maternal shadow, if not from the 
altar ' of this lonely chapel — that the heartless villain carried 
off the flower of the mountains. Between this place and Kes- 
wick they continued to move backwards and forwards, until at 
length, with the startling of a thunderclap to the affrighted 
mountaineers, the bubble burst: officers of justice appeared: 
the stranger was easily intercepted from flight; and, upon a 
capital charge, was borne away to Carlisle. At the ensuing 
assizes he was tried for forgery, on the prosecution of the Post- 
office; found guilty, left for execution, and executed accord- 
ingly. On the day of his condemnation, Wordsworth and 
Coleridge passed through Carlisle, and endeavoured to obtain 
an interview with him. Wordsworth succeeded ; but, for some 
unknown reason, the prisoner steadily refused to see Coleridge; 
a caprice which could not be penetrated. It is true that he had, 
during his whole residence at Keswick, avoided Coleridge with 
a solicitude which had revived the original suspicions against 
him in some quarters, after they had generally subsided. But 
for this, his motive had then been sufficient: he was of a Devon- 
shire family, and naturally feared the eye, or the inquisitive 
examination, of one who bore a name immemorially associated 
with the southern part of that county. 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 325 

Coleridge, however, had been transplanted so immaturely 
from his native region, that few people in England knew less of 
its family connections. That, perhaps, was unknown to this 
malefactor; but at any rate he knew that all motive was now 
at an end for disguise of any sort; so that his reserve, in this 
particular, was unintelligible. However, if not him, Coleridge 
saw and examined his very interesting papers. These were 
chiefly letters from women whom he had injured, pretty much 
in the same way and by the same impostures as he had so 
recently practised in Cumberland; and, as Coleridge assured 
me, were in part the most agonizing appeals that he had ever 
read to human justice and pity. The man's real name was, I 
think, Hatfield. And amongst the papers were two separate 
correspondences, of some length, from two young women, 
apparently of superior condition in life, (one the daughter of 
an English clergyman,) whom this villain had deluded by mar- 
riage, and, after some cohabitation, abandoned — one of them 
with a family of young children. Great was the emotion of 
Coleridge when he recurred to his remembrance of these letters, 
and bitter — almost vindictive — was the indignation with 
which he spoke of Hatfield. One set of letters appeared to have 
been written under too certain a knowledge of his villainy to 
whom they were addressed; 'though still relying on some pos- 
sible remains of humanity, or perhaps, (the poor writer might 
think,) on some lingering relics of affection for herself. The 
other set was even more distressing; they were written under 
the first conflicts of suspicions, alternately repelling with 
warmth the gloomy doubts which were fast arising, and then 
yielding to their afflicting evidence: raving in one page under 
the misery of alarm, in another courting the delusions of hope, 
and luring back the perfidious deserter — here resigning her- 
self to despair, and there again labouring to show that all might 
yet be well. Coleridge said often, in looking back upon that 
frightful exposure of human guilt and misery — and I also 
echoed his feeling — that the man who, when pursued by these 
heart-rending apostrophes, and with this litany of anguish 
sounding in his ears, from despairing women, and from famish- 
ing children, could yet find it possible to enjoy the calm pleas- 
ures of a Lake tourist, and deliberately to hunt for the pic- 
turesque, must have been a fiend of that order which fortu- 
nately does not often emerge amongst men. It is painful to 
remember that, in those days, amongst the multitudes who 
ended their career in the same ignominious way, and the 
majority for offences connected with the forgery of Bank notes, 



326 DE QUINCE Y 

there must have been a considerable number who perished from 
the very opposite cause — viz. because they felt, too passion- 
ately and profoundly for prudence, the claims of those who 
looked up to them for support. One common scaffold con- 
founds the most flinty hearts and the tenderest. However, in 
this instance, it was in some measure the heartless part of Hat- 
field's conduct, which drew upon him his ruin : for the Cumber- 
land Jury, as I have been told, declared their unwillingness to 
hang him for having forged a frank: and both they, and those 
who refused to aid his escape, when first apprehended, were 
reconciled to this harshness entirely by what they heard of his 
conduct to their injured young fellow-countrywoman. 

She, meantime, under the name of " The Beauty of Butter- 
mere," became an object of interest to all England: dramas and 
melodramas were produced in the London suburban theatres 
upon her story ; and for many a year afterwards, shoals of tour- 
ists crowded to the secluded lake, and the little homely cabaret, 
which had been the scene of her brief romance. It was for- 
tunate for a person in her distressing situation, that her home 
was not in a townj the few, and simple neighbours, who had 
witnessed her imaginary elevation, having little knowledge of 
worldly feelings, never for an instant connected with her disap- 
pointment any sense of the ludicrous, or spoke of it as a calam- 
ity to which her vanity might have co-operated. They treated 
it as unmixed injury, reflecting shame upon nobody but the 
wicked perpetrator. Hence, without much trial to her 
womanly sensibilities, she found herself able to resume her 
situation in the little inn; and this she continued to hold for 
many years. In that place, and that capacity, I saw her 
repeatedly, and shall here say a word upon her personal appear- 
ance, because the Lake poets all admired her greatly. Her 
figure was, in my eyes, good; but I doubt whether most of my 
readers would have thought it such. She was none of your 
evanescent, wasp-waisted beauties; on the contrary, she was 
rather large every way; tallish, and proportionably broad. 
Her face was fair, and her features feminine; and unquestion- 
ably she was what all the world have agreed to call " good- 
looking." But, except in her arms, which had something of a 
statuesque beauty, and in her carriage which expressed a 
womanly grace, together with some slight dignity and self- 
possession, I confess that I looked in vain for any positive 
qualities of any sort or degree. Beautiful, in any emphatic 
sense, she was not. Everything about her face and bust was 
negative; simply without offence. Even this, however, was 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 327 

more than could be said at all times: for the expression of her 
countenance was often disagreeable. This arose out of her 
situation; connected as it was with defective sensibiUty, and a 
misdirected pride. 

Nothing operates so dififerently upon different minds, and 
different styles of beauty, as the inquisitive gaze of strangers, 
whether in the spirit of respectful admiration or of insolence. 
Some I have seen, upon whose angelic beauty this sort of con- 
fusion settled advantageously, and like a softening veil ; others, 
in whom it meets with proud resentment, are sometimes dis- 
figured by it. In Mary of Buttermere, it roused mere anger 
and disdain; which, meeting with the sense of her humble and 
dependent situation, gave birth to a most unhappy aspect of 
countenance. Men, who had no touch of a gentleman's nature 
in their composition, sometimes insulted her by looks and by 
words : and she too readily attributed the same spirit of imperti- 
nent curiosity to every man whose eyes happened to settle 
steadily upon her face. Yet, once at least, I must have seen 
her under the most favourable circumstances: for on my first 
visit to Buttermere, I had the pleasure of Mr. Southey's com- 
pany, who was incapable of wounding anybody's feelings, and 
to Mary, in particular, was well known by kind attentions, and 
I believe by some services. • Then at least I saw her to advant- 
age, and perhaps, for a figure of her build, at the best age; for 
it was about nine or ten years after her misfortune, when she 
might be twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. We were 
alone, a solitary pair of tourists: nothing arose to confuse or 
distress her. She waited upon us at dinner, and talked to us 
freely. " This is a respectable young woman," I said to myself; 
but nothing of that enthusiasm could I feel, which beauty, such 
as I have beheld at the lakes, would have been apt to raise 
under a similar misfortune. One lady, not very scrupulous 
in her embellishments of facts, used to tell an anecdote of her, 
which I hope was exaggerated. Some friend of hers, (as she 
affirmed,) in company with a large party, visited Buttermere, 
within a day or two after that upon which Hatfield suffered; and 
she protested that Mary threw upon the table, with an emphatic 
gesture, the Carlisle paper, containing an elaborate account of 
his execution. 

It is an instance of Coleridge's carelessness — that he, who 
had as little ill-nature in his temper as any person whom I have 
ever known, managed, in reporting this story at the time of its 
occurrence, to get himself hooked into a personal quarrel, 
which hung over his head unsettled for nine or ten years. A 



328 DE QUINCEY 

Liverpool merchant, who was then meditating a house in the 
vale of Grasmere, and perhaps might have incurred Coleridge^s 
anger, by thus disturbing, with inappropriate intrusions, this 
loveliest of all English landscapes, had connected himself a 
good deal with Hatfield during his Keswick masquerade: and 
was said even to have carried his regard to that villain so far 
as to have christened one of his own children by the names of 
" Augustus Hope." With these and other circumstances, 
expressing the extent of the infatuation amongst the swindler's 
dupes, Coleridge made the public merry. Naturally the Liver- 
pool merchant was not amongst those who admired the face- 
tiousness of Coleridge on this occasion, but swore vengeance 
whenever they should meet. They never did meet, until ten 
years had gone by, and then, oddly enough, it was in the Liver- 
pool man's own house — that very nuisance of a house which 
had, I suppose, first armed Coleridge's wrath against him. 
This house, by time and accident, in no very wonderful way, 
had passed into the hands of Wordsworth as tenant, Coleridge, 
as was still less wonderful, had become the visitor of Words- 
worth on returning from Malta; and the Liverpool merchant, 
as was also natural, either seeking his rent, or for what other 
purpose I know not, calling upon Wordsworth, met Coleridge 
in the hall. Now came the hour for settling old accounts. I 
was present, and can report the case. Both looked grave, and 
coloured a little. But Coleridge, requesting his enemy's com- 
pany in the garden, entered upon a long metaphysical disserta- 
tion, which was rather puzzling to answer. It seemed to be an 
expansion, by Thomas Aquinas, of that parody upon a well 
known passage in Shenstone, where the writer says^ 

" He kicked me down stairs with such a sweet grace, 
That I thought he was handing me up." 

And in the upshot it clearly made it appear that, purely on prin- 
ciples of good neighbourhood, and universal philanthropy, 
could Coleridge have meditated or executed the insult ofifered 
in the " Morning Post." The Liverpool merchant rubbed his 
forehead, and seemed a little perplexed; but at length, consider- 
ing, perhaps, how very like Duns Scotus, or Albertus Magnus, 
Coleridge had shown himself in this luminous explanation, he 
began to reflect, that had any one of those distinguished men 
offered a similar affront, it would have been impossible to 
resent it; for who could think of caning the seraphic doctor? or 
would it tell to any man's advantage in history that he had 
kicked Thomas Aquinas? On these principles, therefore, with- 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 329 

out saying" one word, he held out his hand, and a lasting recon- 
ciliation followed. 

Not very long, I believe after this affair of Hatfield, Coler- 
idge went to Malta. His inducement to such a step must 
have been merely a desire to see the most interesting regions 
of the Mediterranean, under the shelter and advantageous 
introduction of an official station. It was, however, an unfor- 
tunate chapter of his life: for being necessarily thrown a good 
deal upon his own resources in the narrow society of a gar- 
rison, he there confirmed and cherished, if he did not there 
form, his habit of taking opium in large quantities. I am the 
last person in the world to press conclusions harshly or uncan- 
didly against Coleridge; but I believe it to be notorious that he 
first began the use of opium, not as a relief from any bodily 
pains or nervous irritations — for his constitution was strong 
and excellent — but as a source of luxurious sensations. It is 
a great misfortune, at least it is a great peril, to have tasted 
the enchanted cup of youthful rapture incident to the poetic 
temperament. That standard of high-wrought sensibility once 
made known experimentally, it is rare to see a submission 
afterwards to the sobrieties of daily life. Coleridge, to speak 
in the words of Cervantes, wanted better bread than was made 
of wheat; and when youthful blood no longer sustained the riot 
of his animal spirits, he endeavoured to excite them by artificial 
stimulants. 

At Malta he became acquainted with Commodore Decatur 
and other Americans of distinction; and this brought him 
afterwards into connection with Allston the American artist. 
Of Sir Alexander Ball, one of Lord Nelson's captains in the 
battle of the Nile, and now Governor of Malta, he spoke and 
wrote uniformly in a lavish style of panegyric, for which plainer 
men found it difficult to see the slightest ground. It was 
indeed, Coleridge's amiable infirmity to project his own mind, 
and his own very peculiar ideas, nay, even his own expressions 
and illustrative metaphors, upon other men, and to contemplate 
these reflex images from himself, as so many characters having 
an absolute ground in some separate object. Ball and Bell* 
were two of these pet subjects; he had a " craze " about each of 
them; and to each he ascribed thoughts and words, to which, 
had they been put upon the rack, they never would have 
confessed. 

From Malta, on his return homewards, he went to Rome and 
Naples. One of the Cardinals, he tells us, warned him, by 
the Pope's wish, of some plot, set on foot by Bonaparte, for 



330 DE QUINCEY 

seizing him as an anti-Gallican writer. This statement was 
ridiculed, by the anonymous assailant in " Blackwood," as the 
very consummation of moon-struck vanity; and it is there 
compared to John Dennis's frenzy in retreating from the sea- 
coast, under the belief that Louis XIV had commissioned 
emissaries to land on the English shore and make a dash at 
his person. But, after all, the thing is not so entirely improb- 
able. For it is certain that some orator of the Opposition 
(Charles Fox, as Coleridge asserts,) had pointed out all the 
principal writers in the " Morning Post," to Napoleon's ven- 
geance, by describing the war as a war " of that journal's crea- 
tion." And, as to the insinuation that Napoleon was above 
throwing his regards upon a simple writer of political essays, 
that is not only abundantly confuted by many scores of analo- 
gous cases, but also is specially put down by a case circum- 
stantially recorded in the second tour to Paris, by the 
celebrated John Scott. It there appears, that, on no other 
ground whatever, than that of his connection with the London 
newspaper press, some friend of Mr. Scott's had been courted 
most assiduously by Napoleon during the hundred days. 
Assuredly, Coleridge deserved, beyond all other men that ever 
were connected with the daily press, to be regarded with dis- 
tinction. Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, 
never to be disentombed or restored to human admiration. 
Like the sea, it has swallowed treasures without end, that no 
diving-bell will bring up again. But nowhere throughout its 
shoreless magazines of wealth, does there lie such a bed of 
pearls confounded with the rubbish and " purgamenta " of ages, 
as in the political papers of Coleridge. No more appreciable 
monument could be raised to the memory of Coleridge, than a 
republication of his essays in the " Morning Post," but still more 
of those afterwards published in the " Courier." And here, by 
the way, it may be mentioned, that the sagacity of Coleridge, 
as applied to the signs of the times, is illustrated by the fact, 
that, distinctly and solemnly he foretold the restoration of the 
Bourbons, at a period when most people viewed such an 
event as the most romantic of visions, and not less chimerical 
than that " march upon Paris," of Lord Hawkesbury's, which 
for so many years supplied a theme of laughter to the Whigs. 
Why Coleridge left Malta, is as difficult to explain upon any 
principles of ordinary business, as why he had ever gone 
thither. The post of secretary, if it imposed any official attend- 
ance of a regular kind, or any official correspondence, must 
have been but poorly filled by him; and Sir Alexander Ball, 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 331 

if I have collected his character justly, was not likely to accept 
the gorgeous philosophy of Coleridge, as an indemnification 
for irregular performance of his public duties. Perhaps, there- 
fore, though on the best terms of mutual regard, they might 
be mutually pleased to part. At any rate they did part; and 
poor Coleridge was seasick the whole of his homeward (as he 
had been through the whole of his outward) voyage. 

It was not long after this event that my own introduction to 
Coleridge occurred. At that time some negotiation was pend- 
ing between him and the Royal Institution, which ended in 
their engaging him to deliver a course of lectures on " Poetry 
and the Fine Arts," during the ensuing winter. For this series 
(twelve to sixteen, I think,) he received a sum of one hundred 
guineas. And considering the slightness of the pains which 
he bestowed upon them, he was well remunerated. I fear that 
they did not increase his reputation; for never did any man 
treat his audience with less respect, or his task with less care- 
ful attention. I was in London for part of the time, and can 
report the circumstances, having made a point of attending duly 
at the appointed hours. Coleridge was at that time living 
uncomfortably enough at the " Courier " Ofifice, in the Strand. 
In such a situation, annoyed by the sound of feet passing his 
chamber door continually 'to the printing rooms of this great 
establishment, and with no gentle ministrations of female hands 
to sustain his cheerfulness, naturally enough his spirits flagged; 
and he took more than ordinary doses of opium. I called 
upon him daily, and pitied his forlorn condition. There was 
no bell in the room, which for many months answered the 
double purpose of bed-room and sitting-room. Consequently, 
I often saw him, picturesquely enveloped in night-caps, sur- 
mounted by handkerchiefs indorsed upon handkerchiefs, 
shouting from the attics of the " Courier " Office, down three 
or four flights of stairs, to a certain " Mrs. Bainbridge," his sole 
attendant, whose dwelling was in the subterranean regions of 
the house. There did I often see the philosopher, with a most 
lugubrious face, invoking with all his might this uncouth name 
of " Bainbridge," each syllable of which he intonated with long- 
drawn emphasis, in order to overpower the hostile hubbub 
coming downwards from the press, and the roar from the 
Strand, which entered at all the front windows. " Mrs. Bain- 
bridge! I say, Mrs. Bainbridge! " was the perpetual cry, until 
I expected to hear the Strand, and distant Fleet Street, take up 
the echo of " Bainbridge ! " Thus unhappily situated, he sank 
more than ever under the dominion of opium; so that, at two 



332 DE QUINCEY 

o'clock, when he should have been in attendance at the Royal 
Institution, he was too often unable to rise from bed. Then 
came dismissals of audience after audience with pleas of illness; 
and on many of his lecture days, I have seen all Albemarle 
Street closed by a *' lock " of carriages filled with women of 
distinction, until the servants of the Institution or their own 
footmen advanced to the carriage doors with the intelligence 
that Mr. Coleridge had been suddenly taken ill. This plea, 
which at first had been received with expressions of concern, 
repeated too often, began to rouse disgust. Some in anger, 
and some in real uncertainty whether it would not be trouble 
thrown away, ceased to attend. And we that were more con- 
stant, too often found reason to be disappointed with the quality 
of his lecture. His appearance was generally that of a person 
struggling with pain and overmastering illness. His lips were 
baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and in spite 
of the water which he continued drinking through the whole 
course of his lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost 
paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower. In 
such a state it is clear that nothing could save the lecture itself 
from reflecting his own feebleness and exhaustion, except the 
advantage of having been precomposed in some happier mood. 
But that never happened: most unfortunately he relied upon 
his extempore ability to carry him through. Now, had he 
been in spirits, or had he gathered animation and kindled by 
his own motion, no written lecture could have been more effect- 
ual than one of his unpremeditated colloquial harangues. But 
either he was depressed originally below the point from which 
any re-ascent was possible, or else this re-action was intercepted 
by continual disgust, from looking back upon his own ill suc- 
cess; for assuredly he never once recovered that free and elo- 
quent movement of thought which he could command at any 
time in a private company. The passages he read, moreover, in 
illustrating his doctrines, were generally unhappily chosen, 
because chosen at hap-hazard, from the difficulty of finding at 
a moment's summons, those passages which he had in his eye. 
Nor do I remember any that produced much efifect, except two 
or three, which I myself put ready marked into his hands, 
among the " Metrical Romances " edited by Ritson. 

Generally speaking, the selections were as injudicious and as 
inappropriate, as they were ill delivered; for amongst Coler- 
idge's accomplishments good reading was not one; he had 
neither voice, nor management of voice. This defect is unfor- 
tunate in a public lecturer; for it is inconceivable how much 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 333 

weight and effectual pathos can be communicated by sonorous 
depth, and melodious cadences of the human voice, to senti- 
ments the most trivial; nor, on the other hand, how the grand- 
est are emasculated by a style of reading, which fails in 
distributing the lights and shadows of a musical intonation. 
However, this defect chiefly concerned the immediate impres- 
sion; the most afiflicting to a friend of Coleridge's was the entire 
absence of his own peculiar and majestic intellect; no heart, 
no soul, was in anything he said; no strength of feeling in recall- 
ing universal truths: no power of originality or compass of 
moral relations in his novelties — all was a poor faint reflection 
from jewels once scattered in the highway by himself, in the 
prodigality of his early opulence — a mendicant dependence on 
the alms dropped from his own overflowing treasury of happier 
times. Such a collapse, such a quenching of the eagle's talons 
never was seen before. And as I returned from one of the 
most afflicting of these disappointments, I could not but repeat 
to myself part of that divine chorus, 

"Oh! dark, dark, dark, dark! 

Amid the blaze of noon 
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse," etc., etc. 

The next opportunity I had of seeing Coleridge was at the 
Lakes, in the winter of 1809, and up to the autumn of the fol- 
lowing year. During this period it was, that he carried on the 
original publication of "The Friend; " and for much the greater 
part of the time I saw him daily. He lived as a visitor in the 
house occupied by Mr. Wordsworth ; this house was in Gras- 
mere; and in another part of the same vale, at a distance of 
barely one mile, I myself had a cottage and a considerable 
library. Many of my books being German, Coleridge borrowed 
them in great numbers. Having a general license from me 
to use them as he would, he was in the habit of accumulating 
them so largely at Allan Bank, (the name of Mr. Wordsworth's 
house,) that sometimes as many as five hundred were absent 
at once; which I mention, in order to notice a practice of Coler- 
idge's indicating his very scrupulous honour, in what regarded 
the rights of ownership. Literary people are not always so 
strict in respecting property of this description; and I know 
more than one celebrated man, who professes as a maxim, that 
he holds it no duty of honour to restore a borrowed book; not 
to speak of many less celebrated persons, who, without openly 
professing such a principle, do, however, in fact, exhibit a lax 
morality in such cases. The more honourable it was to poor 



334 ^^ QUINCEY 

Coleridge, who had means so trifling of buying books for him- 
self — that, to prevent my flocks from mixing, and being con- 
founded with the flocks already folded at Allan Bank, (his own 
and Wordsworth's,) or rather that they might mix without 
danger, he duly inscribed my name in the blank leaves of every 
volume; a fact which became rather painfully made known to 
me; for, as he had chosen to dub me ** Esquire," many years 
after this, it cost myself and a female friend some weeks of 
labour to hunt out these multitudinous memorials, and to erase 
this heraldic addition — which else had the appearance to a 
stranger of having been conferred by myself. 

" The Friend," in its original publication, was, as a pecuniary 
speculation, the least judicious, both in its objects and its 
means, I have ever known. It was printed at Penrith, a town 
in Cumberland, on the outer verge of the Lake District, and 
precisely twenty-eight miles removed from Coleridge's abode. 
This distance, enough of itself in all conscience, was at least 
trebled in effect by the interposition of Kirkstone, a mountain 
which is scaled by a carriage ascent of three miles long, and 
so steep in parts, that, without four horses, no solitary traveller 
can persuade the neighbouring innkeepers to carry him. 
Another road, by way of Keswick, is subject to its own separate 
difficulties. And thus in any practical sense, for ease, for cer- 
tainty, and for dispatch, Liverpool, ninety-five miles distant, 
was virtually nearer. Dublin even, or Cork, was more eligible. 
Yet in this town, so situated as I have stated, by way of pur- 
chasing such intolerable difficulties at the highest price, Coler- 
idge was advised, and actually persuaded to set up a printer, 
by buying types, etc., instead of resorting to some printer 
already established in Kendal, a large and opulent town, not 
more than eighteen miles distant, and connected by a daily 
post; whereas, between himself and Penrith there was no post 
at all. Building his mechanical arrangements upon this utter 
" upside-down " inversion of all common sense, it is not sur- 
prising (as " madness ruled the hour ") that in all other circum- 
stances of plan or execution, the work moved by principles of 
downright crazy disregard to all that a judicious counsel would 
have suggested. The subjects were generally chosen, obsti- 
nately in defiance of the popular taste; they were treated in a 
style which avowed contempt for the popular models; and the 
plans adopted for obtaining payment were of a nature to insure 
a speedy bankruptcy to the concern. Coleridge had a Hst, 
nobody could ever say upon whose authority gathered together, 
of subscribers. He tells us himself that many of these 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 335 

renounced the work from an early period; and some (as Lord 
Corke) rebuked him for his presumption m sendmg it unor- 
dered but (as Coleridge asserts) neither returned the copies, 
nor remitted the pric?. And even those who were consci- 
entious enough to do this could not remit four or five shiUings 
for as many numbers without putting Coleridge to an expense 
of treble postage at the least. This he complains of bitterly 
m his " Biographia Literaria," forgetting evidently that the evil 
was due exclusively to his own defective arrangements. People 
necessarily sent their subscriptions through such channels as 
were open to them, or such as were Pointed out by Coleridge 
himself It is also utterly unworthy of Coleridge to have taxed, 
as he does, many (or all, for anything that appears,) of his sub- 
^r^ers with neglecting to pay at all. P-^ably nobody 
neelected. And, on the other hand, some, perhaps, as a most 
conscientious and venerable female relation of my own who 
had subscribed merely to oblige me, and out of a general 
respect for Coleridge's powers, though finding nothmg to suit 
her own taste: she, I happened to know, paid three times oyer 
sending the mone^ through three different channels according 
to the shifting directions which reached her Managed as the 
reader will collect from these indications, the work was going 
down-hill from the first. Itmever gained any accessions of new 
subscribers: from what source, then, was the contmual drop- 
ping off of names to be supplied? The printer became a bank- 
rupt- Coleridge was as much in arrear with his articles as with 
his lectures at the Royal Institution. That he was from the 
very first; but now he was disgusted and desponding; and with 
No 28 the work came to a final stop. Some years after it was 
recast as the phrase was, and republished. But, in fact, this 
recast was pretty nearly a new work. The sole contributors to 
the original work had been Wordsworth, who gave a very valu- 
able paper on the principles concerned in the composition of 
epitaphs; and Professor Wilson, who, in conjunction with 
Mr Blair, an early friend, then visiting at his place on Winder- 
mere, wrote the letter signed " Mathetes," the reply to which 
came from Mr. Wordsworth. 

Notes 
^That is, a 'Statesman, elliptically for an Estatesman-a native 
dalesman possessing and personally cultivating a patrimonial landed 

*^»^stnce this was first written, social changes in London, by introduc- 
ing women very extensively into the office (oncfe monopolized by 
mfn) of attending the visitors at the tables of eating-houses, have intro- 



336 



DE QUINCEY 



duced a corresponding new word, viz. "waitress;" which word, 
twenty-five years back, would have been simply ludicrous; but now has 
become as indispensable to precision of language as the words 
traitress, heiress, inheritrix, etc. 

' My doubt is founded upon the varying tenure of these secluded 
chapels as to privileges of marrying or burying. The mere name of 
chapel, though, of course, in regular connection with some mother 
church, does not of itself imply whether it has or has not the power 
to solemnize a marriage. 

* Sir Alexander Ball, Governor of Malta, and Dr. Andrew Bell, the 
importer into England from Madras of that machinery for facilitating 
popular education, which was afterwards fraudulently appropriated by 
Joseph Lancaster. The Bishop of Durham (Shute Barrington) gave 
to Dr. Bell, in reward of his Madras services, the princely Mastership 
of Sherborne Hospital. The doctor saved, in this post, £125,000, and 
with this money founded Trinity College, Glenalmond, in Perthshire. 
Most men have their enemies and calumniators; Dr. Bell had his, 
who happened rather indecorously to be his wife — from whom he 
was legally separated, or (as in Scotch law it is called) divorced; 
not, of course, divorced a vinculo matrimonii (which only amounts 
to a divorce in the English sense — such a divorce as enables the 
parties to contract another marriage), but simply divorced a mensa 
et thoro. This legal separation, however, did not prevent the lady 
from persecuting the unhappy doctor with everlasting letters, 
indorsed outside with records of her enmity and spite. Sometimes 
she addressed her epistles thus: "To that supreme of rogues, who 
looks the hang-dog that he is. Doctor (such a doctor!) Andrew 
Bell." Or again: "To the ape of apes, and the knave of knaves, 
who is recorded to have once paid a debt — but a small one, you may 
be sure, it was that he selected for this wonderful experiment — in 
fact, it was 4^/^d. Had it been on the other side of 6d., he must have 
died before he could have achieved so dreadful a sacrifice." Many 
others, most ingeniously varied in the style of abuse, I have heard 
rehearsed by Coleridge, Southey, Lloyd and others; and one, in par- 
ticular, addressed to the doctor, when spending a summer at the 
cottage of Robert Newton, an old soldier, in Grasmere, presented on 
the back two separate adjurations, one specially addressed to Robert 
himself, pathetically urging him to look sharply after the rent of his 
lodgings; and the other more generally addressed to the unfortunate 
person as yet undisclosed to the British public (and in this case turning 
out to be myself), who might be incautious enough to pay the postage 
at Ambleside. " Don't grant him an hour's credit," she urged upon 
the person unknown, " if I had any regard to my family." " Cash 
down!" she wrote twice over. Why the doctor submitted to these 
annoyances, nobody knew. Some said it was mere indolence; but 
others held it to be a cunning compromise with her inexorable 
malice. The letters were certainly open to the "public" eye; but 
meantime the "public" was a very narrow one; the clerks in the 
post-office had little time for digesting such amenities of conjugal 
afifection; and the chance bearer of the letters to the doctor would 
naturally solve the mystery by supposing an extra portion of mad- 
ness in the writer, rather than an extra portion of knavery in the 
reverend receiver. 



Ill 

AT the Lakes, and summoned abroad by scenery so 
exquisite — living, too, in the bosom of a family 
endeared to him by long friendship and sympathy 
the closest with all his propensities and tastes — 
Coleridge (it may be thought) could not sequester himself 
so profoundly as at the " Courier " Office within his own 
shell, or shut himself out so completely from that large 
dominion of eye and ear amongst the hills, the fields, and the 
woods, which once he had exercised so pleasantly to himself, and 
with a participation so immortal, through his exquisite poems, 
to all generations. He was not now reduced to depend upon 
Mrs. Bainbridge, but looked out from his study windows 
upon the sublime hills of Seat Sandal and Arthur's Chair, and 
upon pastoral cottages at their feet; and all around him, he 
heard hourly the murmurings of happy life, the sound of female 
voices, and the innocent laughter of children. But, apparently, 
he was not happy himself; the accursed drug poisoned all 
natural pleasure at' its sources; he burrowed continually deeper 
into scholastic subtleties and metaphysical abstraction, and, 
like that class described by Seneca, in the luxurious Rome of 
his days, he lived chiefly by candle-light. At two or three 
o'clock in the afternoon he would make his first appearance: 
through the silence of the night, when all other lights had long 
disappeared, in the quiet cottage of Grasmere, his lamp might 
be seen invariably by the belated traveller, as he descended the 
long steep from Dun-mailraise ; and at five or six o'clock in 
the morning, when man was going forth to his labour, this 
insulated son of reveries was retiring to bed. 

Society he did not much court, because much was not to be 
had; but he did not shrink from any which wore the promise 
of novelty. At that time the leading person about the Lakes, 
as regarded rank and station, amongst those who had any 
connection with literature, was Dr. Watson, the well-known 
Bishop of Llandaff. This dignitary I knew myself as much as 
I wished to know him, having gone to his house five or six 
times purposely that I might know him: and I shall speak of 
him circumstantially. Those who have read his autobiography, 
22 337 



338 DE QUINCEY 

or are otherwise acquainted with the outhne of his career, will 
be aware that he was the son of a Westmoreland schoolmaster. 
Going to Cambridge, with no great store of classical knowl- 
edge, but with the more common accomplishment of West- 
moreland men, and one better suited to Cambridge, viz. — a 
sufficient basis of mathematics, and a robust, though common- 
place intellect, for improving his knowledge according to any 
direction which accident should prescribe — he obtained the 
Professorship of Chemistry without one iota of chemical knowl- 
edge up to the hour when he gained it : and then setting eagerly 
to work, that he might not disgrace the choice which had thus 
distinguished him, long before the time arrived for commenc- 
ing his prelections, he had made himself capable of writing 
those beautiful essays on that science, which after a revolution, 
and a counter-revolution, so great as succeeding times have 
witnessed, still remain a cardinal book of introductory disci- 
pline to such studies; an opinion authorized not only by Pro- 
fessor Thomson of Glasgow, but also, to myself, by the late 
Sir Humphry Davy. With this experimental proof that a 
Chemical Chair might be won and honoured without previous 
knowledge, even of the chemical alphabet, he resolved to play 
the same feat with the Royal Chair of Divinity; one far more 
important for local honour, and for wealth. Here again he suc- 
ceeded; and this time he extended his experiment; for whereas 
both Chairs had been won without previous knowledge, he 
resolved that in this case it should be maintained without after 
knowledge. He applied himself simply to the improvement 
of its income, which he raised from £300 to at least 
iiooo per annum. All this he had accomplished before reach- 
ing the age of thirty-five. 

Riches are with us the parent of riches; and success, in the 
hands of an active man, is the pledge of further success. On 
the basis of this Cambridge preferment. Dr. Watson built 
upwards, until he had raised himself, in one way or other, to a 
seat in the House of Lords, and to a commensurate income. 
For the latter half of his life, he — originally a village school- 
master's son — was able to associate with the magnates of the 
land, upon equal terms. And that fact, of itself, without another 
word, implies, in this country, a degree of rank and fortune 
which one would think a sufficient reward even for merit as 
unquestionable as was that of Dr. Watson. Yet he was always 
a discontented man, and a railer at the Government and the 
age which could permit merit such as his to pine away inglori- 
ously, in one of the humblest amongst the bishoprics, with no 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 339 

Other addition to its emoluments than the richest Professorship 
in Europe, and such other accidents in Hfe as gave him in all, 
perhaps, not above seven thousand per annum! Poor man — ■ 
only seven thousand per annum! What a trial to a man's 
patience ! — and how much he stood in need of philosophy, or 
even of religion, to face so dismal a condition! 

The Bishop was himself, in a secondary way, an interesting 
study. What I mean is, that, though originally the furthest 
removed from an interesting person, being a man remarkable 
indeed for robust faculties, but otherwise commonplace in his 
character, worldly-minded, and coarse, even to obtuseness, in 
his sensibilities, he yet became interesting from the strength 
of degree with which these otherwise repulsive characteristics 
were marked. He was one of that numerous order in whom 
even the love of knowledge is subordinate to schemes of 
advancement; and to whom even his own success, and his own 
honour consequent upon that success, had no higher value than 
according to their use as instruments for winning further pro- 
motion. Hence it was, that, when by such aids he had 
mounted to a certain eminence, beyond which he saw little 
promise of further ascent, by their assistance — since at this 
stage it was clear, that party connection in politics must become 
his main reliance — he ceased to regard his favourite sciences 
with much interest. Even chemistry was now neglected. 
This above all, was perplexing to one who did not understand 
his character. For hither one would have supposed he might 
have retreated from his political disappointments, and have 
found a perpetual consolation in honours which no intrigues 
could defeat, and in the gratitude, so pure and untainted, which 
still attended the honourable exertions of his youth. But he 
viewed the matter in a very different light. Other generations 
had come since then, and " other palms were won." To keep 
pace with the advancing science, and to maintain his station 
amongst his youthful competitors, would demand a youthful 
vigour and motives such as theirs. But, as to himself, chemis- 
try had given all it could give. Having first raised himself to 
distinction by that, he had since married into an ancient 
family — one of the leaders amongst the landed aristocracy of 
his own country: — he thus had entitled himself to call the 
head of that family — a territorial potentate with ten thousand 
per annum — by the contemptuous sobriquet of " Dull Daniel; " 
he looked down upon numbers whom, twenty years before, he 
scarcely durst have looked up to; he had obtained a bishopric. 
Chemistry had done all this for him; and had, besides, 



340 DE QUINCEY 

co-operating with luck, put him in the way of reaping a large 
estate from the gratitude and early death of a pupil, Mr. Luther. 
All this chemistry had effected: could chemistry do anything 
more? Clearly not. And here it was, that, having lost his 
motives for cultivating it farther, he regarded the present 
improvers of the science, not with the feelings natural to a dis- 
interested lover of such studies on their own account, but with 
jealousy, as men who had eclipsed or had bedimmed his own 
once brilliant reputation. Two revolutions had occurred since 
his own "palmy days;" Sir Humphry Davy might be right; 
and all might be gold that glistened; but, for his part, he was 
too old to learn new theories — he must be content to hobble 
to his grave with such old-fashioned creeds as had answered in 
his time, when, for aught he could see, men prospered as much 
as in this new-fangled world. This was the tone of his ordinary 
talk; and, in one sense — as regards personal claims, I mean — 
it was illiberal enough; for the leaders of modern chemistry 
never overlooked his claims. Professor Thomson, of Glasgow, 
always spoke of his " Essays " as of a book which hardly any 
revolution could antiquate ; and Sir Humphry Davy, in reply to 
a question which I put to him upon that point, in 1813, declared 
that he knew of no book better qualified, as one of introductory 
discipline to the youthful experimenter, or as an apprenticeship 
to the taste in elegant selection of topics. 

Yet querulous and discontented as the Bishop was, when he 
adverted either to chemistry or to his own position in life, 
the reader must not imagine to himself the ordinary " comple- 
ment " and appurtenances of that character — such as morose- 
ness, illiberality or stinted hospitalities. On the contrary, his 
Lordship was a joyous, jovial, and cordial host. He was 
pleasant, and even kind in his manners; most hospitable in his 
reception of strangers, no matter of what party; and I must 
say that he was as little overbearing in argument, and as little 
stood upon his privilege as a church dignitary, as any " big 
wig " I have happened to know. He was somewhat pompous, 
undoubtedly; but that, in an old academic hero, was rather 
agreeable, and had a characteristic effect. He listened patiently 
to all your objections; and, though steeped to the lips in preju- 
dice, he was really candid. I mean to say, that although, gener- 
ally speaking, the unconscious pre-occupation of his under- 
standing shut up all avenues to new convictions, he yet did his 
best to open his mind to any views that might be presented at 
the moment. And, with regard to his querulous egotism, 
though it may appear laughable enough to all who contrast his 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 341 

real pretensions with their pubHc appreciation, as expressed in 
his acquired opulence and rank; and who contrast, also, his 
case with that of other men in his own profession — such as 
Paley for example — yet it cannot be denied that fortune had 
crossed his path, latterly, with foul winds, no less strikingly 
than his early life had been seconded by her favouring gales. 
In particular, Lady Holland mentioned to a friend of my own 
the following anecdote: "What you say of the Bishop may 
be very true: (they were riding past his grounds at the time, 
which had turned the conversation upon his character and 
public claims;) but to us (Lady Holland meant to the Whig 
party) he was truly honourable and faithful; insomuch, that my 
uncle had agreed with Lord Granville to make him Archbishop 
of York, sede vacante; — all was settled; and had we staid in 
power a little longer, he would, beyond a doubt, have had that 
dignity." 

Now, if the reader happens to recollect how soon the death 
of Dr. Markham followed the sudden dissolution of that short- 
lived administration in 1807, he will see how narrowly Dr. Wat- 
son missed this elevation ; and one must allow for a little occa- 
sional spleen under such circumstances. Yet, what an arch- 
bishop! He talked openly, at his own table, as a Socinian; 
ridiculed the miracles of the New Testament, which he professed 
to explain as so many chemical tricks, or cases of politic leger- 
demain; and certainly had as little of devotional feeling as any 
man that ever lived. It is, by comparison, a matter of little 
consequence, that, in her spiritual integrity, so little regarding 
the church of which he called himself a member, he should, in 
her temporal interests, have been ready to lay her open to any 
assaults from almost any quarter. He could naturally have 
little reverence for the rights of the shepherds, having so little 
for the pastoral ofBce itself, or for the manifold duties it 
imposes. All his public, all his professional duties, he sys- 
tematically neglected. He was a Lord in Parliament, and for 
many a year he never attended in his place; he was a Bishop, 
and he scarcely knew any part of his diocese by sight — living 
three hundred miles away from it: he was a Professor of 
Divinity; he held the richest Professorship in Europe, the 
weightiest, for its functions, in England, — he drew, by his own 
admission, one thousand per annum from its endowments, 
(deducting some stipend to his locum tenens at Cambridge;) 
and for thirty years he never read a lecture, or performed a 
public exercise. Spheres how vast of usefulness to a man as 
able as himself! — subjects of what bitter anguish on the death- 



342 DE QUINCEY 

bed of one who had been tenderly aHve to his own duties! In 
his poHtical purism, and the unconscious partisanship of his 
constitutional scruples, he was a true Whig, and thoroughly- 
diverting. That Lord Lonsdale or that the Duke of Northum- 
berland should interfere with elections, that he thought scan- 
dalous and awful ; but that a Lord of the house of Cavendish or 
Howard, a Duke of Devonshire or Norfolk, or an Earl of 
Carlisle, should traffic in boroughs, or exert the most despotic 
influence as landlords mutato nomine, he viewed as the mere 
natural right of property: and so far was he from loving the 
pure-hearted and unfactious champions of liberty, that, in one 
of his printed works, he dared to tax Milton with having 
knowingly, wilfully, deliberately told a falsehood/ 

Coleridge, it was hardly possible, could reverence a man like 
this: — ordinary men might, because they were told that he had 
defended Christianity against the vile blasphemers and impotent 
theomichrists of the day. But Coleridge had too pure an ideal 
of a Christian philosopher, derived from the age of the Eng- 
lish Titans in theology, to share in that estimate. It is singular 
enough, and interesting to a man who has ever heard Coleridge 
talk, but especially to one who has assisted (to speak in French 
phrase) at a talking party between Coleridge and the Bishop, 
to look back upon an article in the " Quarterly Review," where, 
in connection with the Bishop's autobiography, some sneers are 
dropped with regard to the intellectual character of the neigh- 
bourhood in which he had settled. I have been told, on pretty 
good authority, that this article was written by the late Dr. 
Whittaker, of Craven, the topographical antiquary; a pretty 
sort of person, doubtless, to assume such a tone, in speaking 
of a neighbourhood so dazzling in its intellectual pretensions, 
as that region at that time! 

The Bishop had fixed his abode on the banks of Winder- 
mere. In a small but beautiful park, he had himself raised a 
plain, but handsome and substantial mansion; Calgarth, or 
Calgarth Park, was its name. Now, at Keswick lived Mr. 
Southey; twenty miles distant, it is true, but still, for a bishop 
with a bishop's equipage, not beyond a morning's drive. At 
Grasmere, about eight miles from Calgarth, were to be found 
Wordsworth and Coleridge. At Brathay, about four miles 
from Calgarth, lived Charles Lloyd; and he, far as he was below 
the others I have mentioned, could not in candour be considered 
a common man. He was somewhat too Rousseauish; but he 
had, in conversation, very extraordinary powers for analysis of 
a certain kind, applied to the philosophy of manners, and the 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 343 

most delicate nuances of social life; and his translation of 
" Alfieri " together with his own poems, shows him to have 
been an accomplished scholar. Then, not much above a mile 
from Calgarth, at his beautiful creation of EUeray, lived Pro- 
fessor Wilson, of whom I need not speak. He in fact and 
Mr. Lloyd, w;re on the most intimate terms with the Bishop s 
family. The meanest of these persons was able to have taken 
the conceit " out of Mr. Dr. Whittaker, and all his tribe But 
even in the town of Kendal, about nine miles from Calgarth 
there were many men of information, at least as extensive a 
Dr. Watson's, and amply qualified to have met him upon equal 
terms in conversation. Mathematics, >* is well known are 
extensively cultivated in the north of England. Sedburgh for 
many years, was a sort of nursery, or rura Chapel-of-ease to 
Cambridge. Gough, the blind mathematician and botanist of 
Kendal, was known to fame; but many others m that town 
had accomplishments equal to his; and '"deed, so widely^has 
mathematical knowledge extended itself throughout Northern 
England, that even amongst the poor weavers, mechanic 
labourers for their daily bread, the cultivation of the geometrical 
analysis, in the most refined shape, has 1°"^. P^^^^''^^^^' °^ "^^'.'L^, 
some accounts have been recently published. Some local 
pique, therefore, must have been at the bottom of Dr. W- 
taker's sneer At all events, it was ludicrously contrasted with 
the true state of the case, as brought out by the meeting between 
Coleridge and the Bishop. , , ^- ,.,j; 

Coleridge was armed, at all points, with the scholastic erudi- 
tion which bore upon all questions that could arise m polem c 
divinity. The philosophy of ancient Greece through al its 
schools, the philosophy of the Schoolmen, technically so called, 
church history, eta, Coleridge had within his call. Having 
been personally acquainted, or connected as a pupil, with 
Eichhorn and Michaelis, he knew the whole cycle of scnisms 
and audacious speculations, through which Biblical criticism, 
or Christian philosophy, has revolved in modern Germany 
All this was ground upon which the Bishop of Llandaff trod 
with the infirm footing of a child. He listened to what Coler- 
idge reported with the same sort of pleasurable surprise alter- 
nating with starts of doubt or incredulity, as would naturally 
attend a detailed report from Laputa — which aena region of 
speculation does but too often recur to a sober-minded person, 
in reading of the endless freaks in philosophy of modern Ger- 
many where the sceptre of Mutability, the potentate celebrated 
by Spenser, gathers more trophies in a year, than elsewhere m 



344 ^^ QUINCEY 

a century; "the anarchy of dreams" presiding in her philosophy; 
and the restless elements of opinion, throughout every region 
of debate, moulding themselves eternally, like the billowy 
sands of the desert, as beheld by Bruce, into towering columns, 
that soar upwards to a giddy altitude, then stalk about for a 
minute, all a-glow with fiery colour, and finally unmould and 
" dislimn," with a collapse as sudden as the motions of that 
eddying breeze, under which their vapoury architecture arose. 
Hartley and Locke, both of whom the Bishop made into idols, 
were discussed; especially the former, against whom Coleridge 
alleged some of those arguments which he has used in his "Bio- 
graphia Literaria." The Bishop made but a feeble defence; and, 
upon some points, none at all. He seemed, I remember, much 
struck with one remark of Coleridge's to this effect: "That 
whereas Hartley fancied that our very reasoning was an aggre- 
gation, collected together under the law of association; on the 
contrary, we reason by counteracting that law, — just, said he, 
as in leaping, the law of gravitation concurs to that act in its 
latter part ; but no leap could take place were it not by a counter- 
action of the law." One remark of the Bishop's let me into the 
secret of his very limited reading. Coleridge had used the 
word *' apperception ; " — apparently without intention ; for, on 
hearing some objection to the word, as being " surely not a 
word that Addison would have used," he silently substituted 
another word. Some months afterwards, going with Charles 
Lloyd to call at Calgarth, during the time when " The Friend " 
was appearing, the Bishop again noticed this obnoxious word, 
and in the very same terms : " Now, this word apperception, 
which Mr. Coleridge uses in the last number of ' The Friend,* 
surely, surely it would not have been approved by Addison; 
no, Mr. Lloyd, nor by Swift; nor even, I think, by Arbuthnot." 
Somebody suggested that the word was a new word of Ger- 
man mintage, and most probably due to Kant — of whom the 
Bishop seemed never to have heard. Meantime the fact was, 
and to me an amusing one, that the word had been commonly 
used by Leibnitz — who is really a classical author on such 
subjects. 

In the autumn of 1810, Coleridge left the Lakes; and — so 
far as I am aware — forever. I once, indeed, heard a rumour 
of his having passed through with some party of tourists — • 
some reason struck me, at the time, for believing it untrue — 
but, at all events, he never returned to them as a resident. 
What might be his reason for this eternal self-banishment from 
scenes which he so well understood in all their shifting forms 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 345 

of beauty, I can only guess. Perhaps it v/as the very opposite 
reason to that which is most obvious: not possibly because he 
had become indifferent to their attractions, but because his 
undecaying sensibility to their commanding power, had become 
associated with too afflicting remembrances, and flashes of per- 
sonal recollections, suddenly restored and illuminated — recol- 
lections which will 

" Sometimes leap 
From hiding places ten years deep." 

and bring into collision the present with some long-forgotten 
past, in a form too trying and too painful for endurance. I 
have a brilliant Scotch friend, who cannot walk on the sea- 
shore — within sight of its avqpiOfxov ytlaa^j-a^ the multitudi- 
nous laughter of its waves, or within hearing of its resound- 
ing uproar, because they bring up, by links of old association, 
too insupportably to his mind, the agitations of his glittering, 
but too fervid youth. There is a feeling — morbid it may be, 
but for which no anodyne is found in all the schools from 
Plato to Kant — to which the human mind is liable at times: 
it is best described in a little piece by Henry More, the Platonist. 
He there represents himself as a martyr to his own too passion- 
ate sense of beauty, and his consequent too passionate sense of 
its decay. Everywhere — above, below, around him, in the 
earth, in the clouds, in the fields, and in their " garniture of 
flowers" — he beholds a beauty carried to excess; and this 
beauty becomes a source of endless affliction to him, because 
everywhere he sees it liable to the touch of decay and mortal 
change. During one paroxysm of this sad passion, an angel 
appears to comfort him; and, by the sudden revelation of her 
immortal beauty, does, in fact, suspend his grief. But it is only 
a suspension; for the sudden recollection that her privileged 
condition, and her exemption from the general fate of beauty, 
is only by way of exception to a universal rule, restores his 
grief: "And thou thyself," he says to the angel 

" And thou thyself, that com'st to comfort me, 
Wouldst strong occasion of deep sorrow bring, 
If thou wert subject to mortality! " 

Every man, who has ever dwelt with passionate love upon the 
fair face of some female companion through life, must have 
had the same feeling; and must often, in the exquisite language 
of Shakspeare's sonnets, have commended and adjured all-con- 
quering Time, there, at least, and upon that one tablet of his 
adoration. 



346 DE QUINCEY 

" To write no wrinkle with his antique hand." 

Vain prayer! Empty adjuration! Profitless rebellion against 
the laws which season all things for the inexorable grave 1 Yet 
not the less we rebel again and again ; and though wisdom coun- 
sels resignation and submission, yet, our human passions, still 
cleaving to their object, force us into endless rebellion. Feel- 
ings, the same in kind as these, attach themselves to our mental 
powers, and our vital energies. Phantoms of lost power, sud- 
den intuitions, and shadowy restorations of forgotten feelings, 
sometimes dim and perplexing, sometimes by bright but fur- 
tive glimpses, sometimes by a full and steady revelation, over- 
charged with light — throw us back in a moment upon scenes 
and remembrances that we have left full thirty years behind 
us. In solitude, and chiefly in the solitudes of nature; and 
above all, amongst the great and enduring features of nature, 
such as mountains and quiet dells, and the lawny recesses of 
forests, and the silent shores of lakes, features with which (as 
being themselves less liable to change) our feelings have a 
more abiding association — under these circumstances it is, 
that such evanscent hauntings of our past and forgotten selves 
are most apt to startle and to waylay us. These are positive 
torments from which the agitated mind shrinks in fear; but 
there are others negative in their nature, that is, blank memen- 
toes of power extinct, and of faculties burnt out within us. 
And from both forms of anguish — from this twofold 
scourge — poor Coleridge fled, perhaps, in flying from the 
beauty of external nature. In alluding to this latter, or nega- 
tive form of suffering — that form, I mean, which presents not 
the too fugitive glimpses of past power, but its blank annihi- 
lation — Coleridge himself most beautifully insists upon, and 
illustrates the truth, that all which we find in Nature must be 
created by ourselves; and that alike whether Nature is so gor- 
geous in her beauty as to seem apparelled in her wedding gar- 
ment, or so powerless and extinct as to seem palled in her 
shroud — in either case, 

" O, Lady! we receive but what we give, 
And in our life alone does nature live: 
Ours is her wedding garment, ours, her shroud. 

" It were a vain endeavour, 
Though I should gaze forever 
On that green light that lingers in the west: 
I may not hope from outward forms to win 
The passion and the life whose fountains are within." 

This was one, and the most common shape of extinguished 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 347 

power, from which Coleridge fled to the great city. But 
sometimes the same decay came back upon his heart m the 
more poignant shape of intimations, and vanishing glimpses 
recovered for one moment from the paradise of youth, and 
from the fields of joy and power, over which for him too cer- 
tainly, he felt that the cloud of night had settled forever 
Both modes of the same torment exiled him from nature; and 
for the same reason he fled from poetry and all commerce with 
his own soul; burying himself in the profoundest abstractions 
from life and human sensibilities. 

" For not to think of what I needs must feel, 
But to be still and patient all I can; 
And haply by abstruse research to steal, 
From my own nature, all the natural man: 
This was my sole resource, my only plan: 
Till that which suits a part, infects the whole, ^^ 
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul. 

Such were, doubtless, the true and radical causes, which, for 
the final twenty-four years of Coleridge's life, drew him away 
from those scenes of natural beauty in which only, at an earlier 
staee of life, he found strength and restoration These were 
the causes; but the immediate occasion of his departure from 
the Lakes, in the autumn of 1800, was the favourable opportunity 
then presented to him of migrating in a pleasant way Mr. 
Basil Montagu, the Chancery barrister, happened at that time 
to be returning to London with Mrs. Montagu, from a visit to 
the Lakes or to Wordsworth. His travelling carriage was 
roomy enough to allow of his offering Coleridge a seat in it; 
and his admiration of Coleridge was just then fervent enough to 
prompt a friendly wish for that sort of close connection — viz. 
by domestication as a guest under Mr Basil Montagu's roof -^ 
which is the most trying to friendship, and which in ths 
instance led to a perpetual rupture of it. The domestic habits 
of eccentric men of genius, much more those of a man so irre- 
claimably irregular as Coleridge, can hardly be supposed to 
promise very auspiciously for any connection so close as this. 
A very extensive house and household, together with the 
unHmited Ucense of action which belongs to the menage of 
some great Dons amongst the nobility, could alone have made 
CoTeridge an inmate perfectly desirable. Probably many 
little iealousies and offences had been mutually suppressed; but 
the particular spark which at length fell a^^^g'^t Jhe/orn- 
bustible materials already prepared, ^^^ thus produced the final 
explosion, took the following shape: Mr. Montagu had pub- 



348 DE QUINCEY 

lished a book against the use of wine and intoxicating liquors 
of every sort. Not out of parsimony, or under any suspicion 
of inhospitality, but in mere self-consistency and obedience to 
his own conscientious scruples, Mr. Montagu would not coun- 
tenance the use of wine at his own table. So far, all was right. 
But doubtless, on such a system, under the known habits of 
modern life, it should have been made a rule to ask no man to 
dinner, for to force men, without warning, to a single (and, 
therefore, thoroughly useless) act of painful abstinence, is what 
neither I nor any man can have a right to do. In point of sense, 
it is in fact, precisely the freak of Sir Roger De Coverley, who 
drenches his friend the " Spectator" with a hideous decoction: 
not, as his confiding visitor had supposed, for some certain 
and immediate benefit to follow, but simply as having a tend- 
ency (if well supported by many years continuance of similar 
drenches) to abate the remote contingency of the stone. One 
day's abstinence could do no good on any scheme; and no man 
was likely to ofifer himself for a second. However, such being 
the law of the castle, and that law well known to Coleridge, he, 
nevertheless, thought fit to ask to dinner Colonel, then Cap- 
tain Pasley, of the Engineers, well known in those days for his 
book on the " Military Policy of England; " and since, for his 
" System of Professional Instruction." Now, where or in what 
land, abides that 

*' Captain, or Colonel, or Knight in arms." 

to whom wine in the analysis of dinner is a neutral or indifferent 
element? Wine, therefore, as it was not of a nature to be 
omitted, Coleridge took care to furnish at his own private cost. 
And so far, again, all was right. But, why must Coleridge 
give his dinner to the Captain in Mr. Montagu's house? There 
lay the affront; and, doubtless, it was a very inconsiderate act 
on the part of Coleridge. I report the case simply as it was 
then generally borne upon the breath, not of scandal, but of 
jest and merriment. The result, however, was no jest; for bit- 
ter words ensued — words that festered in the remembrance; 
and a rupture between the parties followed which no reconcilia- 
tion ever healed. 

Meantime, on reviewing this story, as generally adopted by 
the learned in literary scandal, one demur rises up. Dr. Parr, 
a lisping old dotard, without dignity or power of mind of any 
sort, was a frequent and privileged inmate at Mr. Montagu's. 
Him, now, this Parr, there was no conceivable motive for 
enduring; that point is satisfactorily settled by the pompous 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 349 

inanities of his works. Yet, on the other hand, his habits were 
in their own nature far less endurable; for the monster 
smoked; — and how? How did the " Birmmgham Doctor 
smoke? Not as you or I, or other civilized people smoke, 
with a eentle cigar — but with shag tobacco. And those who 
know how that abomination lodges and nestles m the draperies 
of window curtains, will guess the ^p™^,^^^ .f^^^^t^l^'^'' '"} 
which the old Whig's memory is held by all enlightened 

women. 

Notes 

^This supposed falsehood respected the sect called Brownists and 
occurs in the " Defensis pro Populo Anglicano." The whole charge is 
a Wunder, and rests upon the Bishop's own imperfect knowledge of 

^'TOs'was a sobriquet imposed on Dr. Parr by' Jhe Pursui^^^^^^^^ 
Literature," that most popular of satires at the end of the eighteenth 
and opening of the nineteenth centuries, The name had a mixed 
reference to the doctor's personal connection with Warwickshire, but 
ch fefly to the doctor's spurious and windy imitation of Dr. Johnson^ 
He was viewed as the Birming (or mock) Dr. Johnson. Why the 
word Birmingham has come for the last sixty or seventy years to indi- 
cate in every class of articles the spurious m opposition to the genuine, 
I suppole to have arisen from the Birmingham habit of . reproduc- 
ing Si sorts of London or Paris trinkets, bijouterie, etc., in cheaper 
materials and with inferior workmanship. 



IV 

FROM Mr. Montagues Coleridge passed, by favour 
of what introduction I never heard, into a family 
as amiable in manners and as benign in dispo- 
sition, as I remember to have ever met with. 
On this excellent family I look back with threefold 
affection, on account of their goodness to Coleridge, and 
because they were then unfortunate, and because their union 
has long since been dissolved by death. The family was com- 
posed of three members: of Mr. M , once a lawyer, who 

had, however, ceased to practise; of Mrs. M , his wife, 

a blooming young woman, distinguished for her fine person; 
and a young lady, her unmarried sister. Here, for some years, 
I used to visit Coleridge; and, doubtless, as far as situation 
merely, and the most delicate attentions from the most amiable 
women, could make a man happy, he must have been so at this 
time; for both the ladies treated him as an elder brother, or as 
a father. At length, however, the cloud of misfortune, which 
had long settled upon the prospects of this excellent family, 
thickened; and I found, upon one of my visits to London, that 
they had given up their house in Berners Street, and had retired 
to a cottage in Wiltshire. Coleridge had accompanied them; 
and there I visited them myself, and, as it eventually proved, 
for the last time. Some time after this, I heard from Coleridge, 

with the deepest sorrow, that poor M had been thrown 

into prison, and had sunk under the pressure of his misfortunes. 
The gentle ladies of his family had retired to remote friends; 
and I saw them no more, though often vainly making inquiries 
about them. 

Coleridge, during this part of his London life, I saw con- 
stantly — generally once a day, during my own stay in London ; 
and sometimes we were jointly engaged to dinner parties. In 
particular, I remember one party at which we met Lady Hamil- 
ton — Lord Nelson's Lady Hamilton — the beautiful, the 
accomplished, the enchantress ! Coleridge admired her, as who 
would not have done, prodigiously; and she, in her turn, was 
fascinated with Coleridge. He was unusually effective in his 
display; and she, by way of expressing her acknowledgments 

350 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 35 1 

appropriately, performed a scene in Lady Macbeth — how 
splendidly, I cannot better express, than by saying that all of 
us who then witnessed her performance, were familiar with 
Mrs. Siddons's matchless execution of that scene; and yet, with 
such a model filling our imaginations, we could not but 
acknowledge the possibility of another, and a different perfec- 
tion, without a trace of imitation, equally original, and equally 
astonishing. The word " magnificent " is, in this day, most 
lavishly abused : daily I hear or read in the newspapers of mag- 
nificent objects, as though scattered more thickly than black- 
berries; but for my part I have seen few objects really deserv- 
ing that epithet. Lady Hamilton was one of them. She had 
Medea's beauty, and Medea's power of enchantment. But let 
not the reader too credulously suppose her the unprincipled 
woman she has been described. I know of no sound reason 
for supposing the connection between Lord Nelson and her to 
have been other than perfectly virtuous. Her public services, 
I am sure, were most eminent — for that we have indisputable 
authority; and equally sure I am that they were requited with 
rank ingratitude. 

After the household of the poor M s had been dis- 
solved, I know not whither Coleridge went immediately: for 
I did not visit London until some years had elapsed. In 1823- 
24, I first understood that he had taken up his residence as a 
guest with Mr. Gillman, a surgeon, in Highgate. He had then 
probably resided for some time at that gentleman's: there he 
continued to reside on the same terms, I believe, of affectionate 
friendship with the members of Mr. Gillman's family, as had 

made life endurable to him in the time of the M s; and 

there he died in July of the present year. If, generally speak- 
ing, poor Coleridge had but a small share of earthly prosperity, 
inone respect at least, he was eminently favoured by Providence; 
beyond all men who ever perhaps have lived, he found means 
to engage a constant succession of most faithful friends; and 
he levied the services of sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, from 
the hands of strangers — attracted to him by no possible 
impulses but those of reverence for his intellect, and love for 
his gracious nature. How, says Wordsworth 

" How can he expect that others should 
Sow for him, reap for him, and at his call, 
Love him, who for himself will take no thought at all?" 

How can he, indeed? It is most unreasonable to do so; yet 
this expectation, if Coleridge ought not to have entertained, at 



352 DE QUINCEY 

all events he realized. Fast as one friend dropped off, another, 
and another, succeeded: perpetual relays were laid along his 
path in life, of judicious and zealous supporters: who comforted 
his days, and smoothed the pillow for his declining age, even 
when it was beyond all human power to take away the thorns 
which stuffed it. 

And what were those thorns? — and whence derived? That 
is a question on which I ought to decline speaking unless I 
could speak fully. Not, however, to make any mystery of what 
requires none, the reader will understand that originally his 
sufferings, and the death within him of all hope — the palsy, as 
it were, of that which is the life of life, and the heart within 
the heart — came from opium. But two things I must add — 
one to explain Coleridge's case, and the other to bring it within 
the indulgent allowance of equitable judges: — First, the suf- 
ferings from morbid derangements, originally produced by 
opium, had very possibly lost that simple character, and had 
themselves reacted in producing secondary states of disease 
and irritation, not any longer dependent upon the opium, so as 
to disappear with its disuse: hence, a more than mortal dis- 
couragement to accomplish this disuse, when the pains of self- 
sacrifice were balanced by no gleams of restorative feeling. 
Yet, secondly, Coleridge did make prodigious efforts to deliver 
himself from this thraldom; and he went so far at one time in 
Bristol, to my knowledge, as to hire a man for the express pur- 
pose, and armed with the power of resolutely interposing 
between himself and the door of any druggist's shop. It is 
true, that an authority derived only from Coleridge's will, could 
not be valid against Coleridge's own counter-determination: 
he could resume as easily as he could delegate the power. But 
the scheme did not entirely fail; a man shrinks from exposing 
to another that infirmity of will which he might else have but 
a feeble motive for disguising to himself; and the delegated 
man, the external conscience, as it were, of Coleridge, though 
destined — in the final resort, if matters came to absolute rup- 
ture, and to an obstinate duel, as it were, between himself and 
his principal — in that extremity to give way, yet might have 
long protracted the struggle, before coming to that sort of dig- 
nus vindice nodus: and in fact, I know, upon absolute proof, 
that, before reaching that crisis, the man showed fight; and, 
faithful to his trust, and comprehending the reasons for it, he 
declared that if he must yield, he would " know the reason 
why." 

Opium, therefore, subject to the explanation I have made, 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 353 

was certainly the original source of Coleridge's morbid feelings, 
of his debility, and of his remorse. His pecuniary embarrass- 
ments pressed as lightly as could well be expected upon him. 
I have mentioned the annuity of £150 made to him by the two 
Wedgwoods. One half, I believe, could not be withdrawn, 
having been left by a regular testamentary bequest. But the 
other moiety, coming from the surviving brother, was with- 
drawn on the plea of commercial losses, somewhere, I think, 
about 181 5. That would have been a heavy blow to Coleridge; 
and assuredly the generosity is not very conspicuous, of having 
ever suffered an allowance of that nature to be left to the mercy 
of accident. Either it ought not to have been granted in that 
shape — viz. as an annual allowance, giving ground for expect- 
ing its periodical recurrence — or it ought not to have been 
withdrawn. However, this blow was broken to Coleridge by 
the bounty of George IV, who placed Coleridge's name in the 
list of twelve, to whom he granted an annuity of one hundred 
guineas per annum. This he enjoyed so long as that Prince 
reigned. But at length came a heavier blow than that 
from Mr. Wedgwood: a new King arose, who knew 
not Joseph. Yet surely he was not a King who could 
so easily resolve to turn adrift twelve men of letters, many 
of them most accomplished' men, for the sake of appro- 
priating a sum no larger to himself than twelve hundred 
guineas — no less to some of them than the total freight 
of their earthly hopes? — No matter: let the deed have been 
from whose hand it might, it was done : eipyaqat (it was perpe- 
trated,) as saith the " Medea " of Euripides; and it will be men- 
tioned hereafter, " more than either once or twice." It fell with 
weight, and with effect upon the latter days of Coleridge; it 
took from him as much heart and hope as at his years, and 
with his unworldly prospects, remained for man to blight: and, 
if it did not utterly crush him, the reason was — because for 
himself he had never needed much, and was now continually 
drawing near to that haven, in which, for himself, he would 
need nothing; secondly, because his children were now inde- 
pendent of his aid; and, finally, because in this land there are 
men to be found always of minds large enough to comprehend 
the claims of genius, and with hearts, by good luck, more 
generous, by infinite degrees, than the hearts of Princes. 

Coleridge, as I now understand, was somewhere about sixty- 
two years of age when he died. This, however, I take upon 
the report of the public newspapers; for I do not, of my own 
knowledge, know anything accurately upon that point. 

23 



354 . DE QUINCEY 

It can hardly be necessary to inform any reader of discern- 
ment or of much practice in composition, that the whole of this 
article upon Mr. Coleridge, though carried through at inter- 
vals, and (as it has unexpectedly happened) with time sufficient 
to have made it a very careful one, has, in fact, been written 
in a desultory and unpremeditated style. It was originally 
undertaken on the sudden but profound impulse communicated 
to the writer's feelings, by the unexpected news of this great 
man's death; partly, 3ierefore, to relieve by expressing his own 
deep sentiments of reverential affection to his memory and 
partly, in however imperfect a way, to meet the public feeling 
of interest or curiosity about a man who had long taken his 
place amongst the intellectual potentates of the age. Both 
purposes required that it should be written almost extempore: 
the greater part was really and unaffectedly written in that way, 
and under circumstances of such extreme haste, as would 
justify the writer in pleading the very amplest privilege of 
license and indulgent construction which custom concedes to 
such cases. Hence it had occurred to the writer, as a judicious 
principle, to create a sort of merit out of his own necessity; 
and rather to seek after the graces which belong to the episto- 
lary form, or to other modes of composition professedly care- 
less, than after those which grow out of preconceived bio- 
graphies, which, having originally settled their plan upon a 
regular foundation, are able to pursue a course of orderly devel- 
opment, such as his slight sketch had voluntarily renounced 
from the beginning. That mode of composition having been 
once adopted, it seemed proper to sustain it, even after delays 
and interruption had allowed time for throwing the narrative 
into a more orderly movement, and modulating, as it were, into 
a key of the usual solemnity. The qualis ab incepto proces- 
serit — the ordo prescribed by the first bars of the music pre- 
dominated over all other considerations, and to such an extent, 
that he had purposed to leave the article without any regular 
termination or summing up — as, on the one hand, scarcely 
demanded by the character of a sketch so rapid and indigested, 
whilst, on the other, he was sensible that anything of so much 
pretension as a formal peroration, challenged a sort of con- 
sideration to the paper which it was the author's chief wish to 
disclaim. That efifect, however, is sufficiently parried by the 
implied protest now offered; and, on other reasons, it is cer- 
tainly desirable that a general glance, however cursory, should 
be thrown over the intellectual claims of Mr. Coleridge, by 
one who knew him so well, and especially in a case where those 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 355 

very claims constitute the entire and sole justification of the 
preceding personal memoir. That which furnishes the whole 
moving reason for any separate notice at all, and forms its 
whole latent interest, ought not, in mere logic, to be left without 
some notice itself, though as rapidly executed as the previous 
biographical sketch, and, from the necessity of the subject, by 
many times over more imperfect. 

To this task, therefore, the writer now addresses himself; and 
by way of gaining greater freedom of movement, and of 
resuming his conversational tone, he will here again take the 
liberty of speaking in the first person. 

If Mr. Coleridge had been merely a scholar — merely a 
philologist — or merely a man of science — there would be no 
reason apparent for travelling in our survey beyond the field of 
his intellect, rigourously and narrowly so called. But because 
he was a poet, and because he was a philosopher, in a compre- 
hensive and a most human sense, with whose functions the 
moral nature is so largely interwoven, I shall feel myself entitled 
to notice the most striking aspects of his character, (using that 
word in its common limited meaning,) of his disposition, and 
his manners, as so many reflex indications of his intellectual 
constitution. But let it be well understood that I design 
nothing elaborate, nothing comprehensive or ambitious: my 
purpose is merely to supply a few hints and suggestions drawn 
from a very hasty retrospect, by way of adding a few traits to 
any outline which the reader may have framed to himself, either 
from some personal knowledge, or from more full and lively 
memorials. 

One character, in which Mr. Coleridge most often came 
before the public, was that of politician. In this age of fervent 
partisanship, it will, therefore, naturally occur as a first ques- 
tion, to inquire after his party and political connections: was 
he Whig, Tory, or Radical? Or, under a new classification, 
were his propensities Conservative or Reforming? I answer 
that, in any exclusive or emphatic sense, he was none of these; 
because, as a philosopher, he was, according to circumstances, 
and according to the object concerned, all of these by turns. 
These are distinctions upon which a cloud of delusion rests. 
It would not be difficult to show, that in the speculations built 
upon the distinction of Whig and Tory, even by as philosophic 
a politician as Edmund Burke, there is an oversight of the 
largest practical importance. But the general and partisan 
use of these terms superadds to this tcowtov Weodo^ a second 
which is more flagrant. It is this: the terms Whig or Tory, 



356 DE QUINCE Y 

used by partisans, are taken extra gradum, as expressing the 
ideal or extreme cases of the several creeds; whereas, in actual 
life, few such cases are found realized, by far the major part 
of those who answer to either one or the other denomination 
making only an approximation (differing by infinite degrees) 
to the ideal or abstract type. A third error there is, relating to 
the actual extent of the several denominations, even after every 
allowance made for the faintest approximations. Listen to a 
Whig, or to a Tory, and you will suppose that the great bulk 
of society range under his banner: all, at least, who have any 
property at stake. Listen to a Radical, and you will suppose 
that all are marshalled in the same ranks with himself, unless 
those who have some private interest in existing abuses, or 
have aristocratic privileges to defend. Yet, upon going exten- 
sively into society as it is, you find that a vast majority of good 
citizens are of no party whatsoever, own no party designation, 
care for no party interest, but carry their good wishes by turns 
to men of every party, according to the momentary purpose 
they are pursuing. As to Whig and Tory, it is pretty clear 
that only two classes of men, both of limited extent, acknowl- 
edge these as their distinctions; first, those who make politics 
in some measure their profession or trade — whether by stand- 
ing forward habitually in public meetings as leaders or as assist- 
ants, or by writing books and pamphlets in the same cause; 
secondly, those whose rank, or birth, or position in a city, or a 
rural district, almost pledge them to a share in the political 
struggles of the day, under the penalty of being held faineans, 
truants, or even malignant recusants, if they should decline a 
warfare which often, perhaps, they do not love in secret. 
These classes, which, after all, are not numerous, and not 
entirely sincere, compose the whole extent of professing Whigs 
and Tories who make any approach to the standards of their 
two churches ; and, generally speaking, these persons have suc- 
ceeded to their politics and their party ties, as they have to 
their estates, viz. by inheritance. Not their way of thinking 
in poHtics has dictated their party connections; but these con- 
nections, traditionally bequeathed from one generation to 
another, have dictated their politics. 

With respect to the Radical or the Reformer, the case is 
otherwise; for, it is certain, that in this, as in every great and 
enlightened nation, enjoying an intense and fervid communi- 
cation of thought through the press, there is, and must be, a 
tendency widely diffused to the principles of sane reform — an 
anxiety to probe and examine all the institutions of the land 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 357 

by the increasing lights of the age — and a salutary determina- 
tion that no acknowledged abuse shall be sheltered by pre- 
scription, or privileged by its antiquity. In saying, therefore, 
that his principles are spread over the length and breadth of 
the land, the Reformer says no more than the truth. Whig 
and Tory, as usually understood, express only two modes of 
aristocratic partisanship, and it is strange, indeed, to find people 
deluded by the notion that the reforming principle has any 
more natural connection with the first than the last. Reformer 
on the other hand, to a certain extent expresses the political 
creed and aspect of almost every enlightened citizen: but, then, 
how? Not as the Radical would insinuate, as pledging a man 
to a specific set of objects, or to any visible and apparent party, 
having known leaders and settled modes of action. British 
society, in its large majority, may be fairly described as 
Reformers, in the sense of being favourably disposed to a general 
spirit of ventilation and reform carried through all departments 
of public business, political or judicial; but it is so far from 
being, therefore, true that men, in general, are favourably dis- 
posed to any known party, in or out of Parliament, united for 
certain objects and by certain leaders, that, on the contrary, 
this reforming party itself has no fixed unity, and no generally 
acknowledged heads. It is divided both as to persons and as 
to things: the ends to be pursued create as many schisms, as 
the course of means proper for the pursuit, and the choice of 
agents for conducting the public wishes. In fact, it would be 
even more difficult to lay down the ideal standard of a 
Reformer, or his abstract creed, than of a Tory: and supposing 
this done, it would be found, in practice, that the imperfect 
approximations to the pure faith would differ by even broader 
shades, as regarded the reforming creed, than as regarded that 
of the rigourous or ultra Tory. r • •, ^ 

With respect to Mr. Coleridge, he was certainly a friend to 
all enlightened reforms; he was a friend, for example, to Reform 
in Parliament. Sensible, as he was, of the prodigious diffusion 
of knowledge and good sense amongst the classes immediately 
below the gentry in British society, he could not but acknowl- 
edge their right to a larger and a less indirect share of political 
influence. As to the plan, and its extent, and its particular 
provisions, upon those he hesitated and wavered; as other 
friends to the same views have done, and will continue to do 
The only avowed objects of modern Reformers which he would 
strenuously have opposed, nay, would have opposed with the 
zeal of an ancient martyr, are those which respect the Church 



358 DE QUINCE Y 

of England, and, therefore, most of those which respect the 
two Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. There he would 
have been found in the first ranks of the Anti-Reformers. He 
would also have supported the House of Peers as the tried bul- 
wark of our social interests in many a famous struggle, and 
sometimes, in the hour of need, the sole barrier against despotic 
aggressions on the one hand, and servile submissions on the 
other. Moreover, he looked with favour upon many modes of 
aristocratic influence as balances to new-made commercial 
wealth, and to a far baser tyranny likely to arise from that quar- 
ter when unbalanced. But allowing for these points of differ- 
ence, I know of little else stamped with the general seal of 
modern reform, and claiming to be a privileged object for a 
national efifort, which would not have had his countenance. It 
is true, and this I am sensible will be objected, that his party 
connections were chiefly with the Tories; and it adds a seeming 
strength to this objection, that these connections were not those 
of accident, nor those which he inherited, nor those of his youth- 
ful choice. They were sought out by himself, and in his 
maturer years ; or else they were such as sought him for the 
sake of his political principles; and equally in either case, they 
argued some affinity in his political creed. This much cannot 
be denied. But one consideration will serve greatly to qualify 
the inference from these facts. In those years when Mr. Coler- 
idge became connected with Tories, what was the predominating 
and cardinal principal of Toryism, in comparison with which 
all else was willingly slighted? Circumstances of position had 
thrown upon the Tories the onus of a great national struggle, 
the greatest which history anywhere records, and with an 
enemy the most deadly. The Whigs were then out of power: 
they were, therefore, in opposition ; and that one fact, the sim- 
ple fact, of holding an anti-ministerial position, they allowed 
by a most fatal blunder, to determine the course of their foreign 
politics. Napoleon was to be cherished simply because he was 
a thorn in Mr. Pitt's side. So began their foreign poHcy — 
and in that pettiest of personal views. Because they were anti- 
ministerial, they allowed themselves passively to become anti- 
national. To be a Whig, therefore, in those days, implied little 
more than a strenuous opposition to foreign war — to be a 
Tory, pledged a man to little more than war with Napoleon 
Bonaparte. 

And this view of our foreign relations it was that connected 
Coleridge with the Tories, a view which arose upon no motives 
of selfish interest, (as too often has been said in reproach,) but 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 359 

upon the changes wrought in the spirit of the French RepubUc, 
which gradually transmuted its defensive warfare (framed 
originally to meet a conspiracy of kings crusading against the 
new-born democracy of French institutions, whilst yet in their 
cradle) into a warfare of aggression and sanguinary ambition. 
The military strength evoked in France by the madness of 
European kings, had taught her the secret of her own power — 
a secret too dangerous for a nation of vanity so infinite, and so 
feeble in all means of moral self-restraint. The temptation to 
foreign conquest was too strong for the national principles; 
and, in this way, all that had been grand and pure in the early 
pretensions of French Republicanism rapidly melted away 
before the common bribes of vulgar ambition. Unoffending 
states, such as Switzerland, were the first to be trampled under 
foot; no voice was heard any more but the brazen throat of 
war; and after all that had been vaunted of a golden age, and 
a long career opened to the sceptre of pure political justice, the 
clouds gathered more gloomily than ever; and the sword was 
once more reinstated, as the sole arbiter of right, with less dis- 
guise and less reserve than under the vilest despotism of kings. 
The change was in the French Republicans, not in their foreign 
admirers; they, in mere consistency, were compelled into cor- 
responding changes, and into final alienation of sympathy, as 
they beheld, one after one, all titles forfeited, by which that 
grand explosion of pure democracy had originally challenged 
and sustained their veneration. The mighty Republic had now 
begun to revolve through those fierce transmigrations fore- 
seen by Burke, to every one of which, by turns, he had 
denounced an inevitable " purification by fire and blood : " no 
trace remained of her primitive character: and of that awful 
outbreak of popular might, which once had made France the 
land of hope and promise to the whole human race, and had 
sounded a knell to every form of oppression or abuse, no 
record was to be found, except in the stupendous power which 
cemented its martial oligarchy. Of the people, of the democ- 
racy — or that it had ever for an hour been roused from its 
slumbers — one sole evidence remained ; and that lay in the 
blank power of destruction, and its perfect organization, which 
none but a popular movement, no power short of that, could 
have created. The people having been unchained, and, as if 
for the single purpose of creating a vast system of destroying 
energies, had them immediately recoiled within their old limits, 
and themselves become the earliest victim of their own 
statocracy. In this way France had become an object of 



360 DE QUINCEY 

jealousy and alarm. It remained to see to what purpose she 
would apply her new energies. That was soon settled; her 
new-born power was wielded from the first by unprincipled 
and by ambitious men; and, in 1800, it fell under the permanent 
control of an autocrat, whose unity of purpose, and iron will, 
left no room for any hope of change. 

Under these circumstances, under these prospects, coupled 
with this retrospect, what became the duty of all foreign poli- 
ticians? of the English above all, as natural leaders in any hope- 
ful scheme of resistance? The question can scarcely be put 
with decency. Time and season, place or considerations of 
party, all alike vanished before an elementary duty to the 
human race, which much transcended any duty of exclusive 
patriotism. Plant it, however, on that narrower basis, and the 
answer would have been the same for all centuries, and for 
every land under a corresponding state of circumstances. Of 
Napoleon's real purposes there cannot now be any reasonable 
doubt. His confessions — and, in particular, his indirect reve- 
lations at St. Helena — have long since removed all demurs 
or scruples of scepticism. For England, therefore, as in rela- 
tion to a man bent upon her ruin, all distinctions of party were 
annihilated — Whig and Tory were merged and swallowed up 
in the transcendent duties of patriots — Englishmen — lovers 
of liberty. Tories, as Tories, had here no peculiar or separate 
duties — none which belonged to their separate creed in poli- 
tics. Their duties were paramount; and their partisanship had 
here no application — was perfectly indififerent, and spoke 
neither this way nor that. In one respect only they had peculiar 
duties, and a peculiar responsibility; peculiar, however, not by 
any difference of quality, but in its supreme degree; the same 
duties which belonged to all, belonged to them by a heavier 
responsibility. And how, or why? Not as Tories had they, 
or could they have any functions at all applying to this occa- 
sion; it was as being then the ministerial party, as the party 
accidentally in power at the particular crisis: in that character 
it was that they had any separate or higher degree of responsi- 
bility; otherwise, and as to the kind of their duty apart from 
this degree, the Tories stood in the same circumstances as 
men of all other parties. To the Tories, however, as accident- 
ally in possession of the supreme power, and wielding the 
national forces at that time, and directing their application — 
to them it was that the honour belonged of making a beginning: 
on them had devolved the privilege of opening and authorizing 
the dread crusade. How and in what spirit they acquitted 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 36 1 

themselves of that most enviable task enviable for its sanc- 
tity — fearful for the difficulty of its adequate fulfilment — how 
they persevered — and whether, at any crisis, the direst and 
most ominous to the righteous cause, they faltered or gave 
sign of retreating — history will tell — history has already told. 
To the Whigs belonged the duty of seconding their old 
antagonists: and no wise man could have doubted, that, in a 
case of transcendent patriotism where none of those principles 
could possibly apply, by which the two parties were divided 
and distinguished, the Whigs could be anxious to show that, 
for the interests of their common country, they could cheer- 
fully lay aside all those party distinctions, and forget those 
feuds which now had no pertinence or meaning. Simply as 
Whigs, had they stood in no other relation, they probably 
would have done so. Unfortunately, however, for their own 
good name and popularity in after times, they were divided 
from the other party, not merely as Whigs opposed to Tories, 
but also upon another and a more mortifying distinction, which 
was not, like the first, a mere inert question of speculation or 
theory, but involved a vast practical difference of honours and 
emoluments: — they were divided, I say, on another and more 
vexatious principle, as the "Outs" opposed to the "Ins." Simply 
as Whigs, they might have 'coalesced with the Tories quoad 
hoc, and merely for this one purpose. But as men out of 
power, they could not coalesce with those who were in. They 
constituted "his Majesty's Opposition;" and, in a fatal hour, 
they determined that it was fitting to carry on their general 
scheme of hostility even into this sacred and privileged ground. 
That resolution once taken, they found it necessary to pursue 
it with zeal. The case itself was too weighty and too interest- 
ing to allow of any moderate tone for the abetters or opposers. 
Passion and personal bitterness soon animated the contest: 
violent and rash predictions were hazarded — prophecies of 
utter ruin and of captivity for our whole army were solemnly 
delivered: and it soon became evident, as indeed mere human 
infirmity made it beforehand but too probable, that where so 
much personal credit was at stake upon the side of our own 
national dishonour, the wishes of the prophet had been pledged 
to the same result as the credit of his political sagacity. Many 
were the melancholy illustrations of the same general case. 
Men were seen fighting against the evidences of some great 
British victory with all the bitterness and fierce incredulity 
which usually meet the first rumours of some private calamity: 
that was in effect the aspect in their eyes of each national tri- 



362 DE QUINCEY 

umph in its turn. Their position, connected with the unfor- 
tunate election made by the Whig leaders of their tone, from 
the very opening of the contest, gave the character of a calamity 
for them and for their party, to that which to every other heart 
in Britain was the noblest of triumphs in the noblest of causes; 
and, as a party, the Whigs mourned for years over those events 
which quickened the pulses of pleasure and sacred exultation 
in every other heart. God forbid that all Whigs should have 
felt in this unnatural way! I speak only of the tone set by the 
Parliamentary leaders. The few who were in Parliament, and 
exposed to daily taunts from the just exultation of their irritated 
opponents, had their natural feelings poisoned and envenomed. 
The many who were out of Parliament, and not personallv 
interested in this warfare of the Houses, were left open to nat- 
ural influences of patriotic pride, and to the contagion of public 
sympathy: and these, though Whigs, felt as became them. 

These are things too unnatural to be easily believed; or, in a 
land where the force of partisanship is less, to be easily under- 
stood. Being true, however, they ought not to be forgotten: 
and at present it is almost necessary that they should be stated 
for the justification of Coleridge. Too much has been written 
upon this part of his life, and too many reproaches thrown out 
upon his levity or his want of principle in his supposed sacrifice 
of his early political connections, to make it possible for any 
reverencer of Coleridge's memory to pass over the case with- 
out a full explanation. That explanation is involved in the 
strange and scandalous conduct of the Parliamentary Whigs. 
Coleridge passed over to the Tories only in that sense in which 
all patriots did so at that time, and in relation to our great 
foreign interest — viz. by refusing to accompany the Whigs 
in their almost perfidious demeanour towards Napoleon Bona- 
parte. Anti-ministerial they afifect to style their policy, but 
in the most eminent sense it was anti-national. It was thus 
far — viz. exclusively, or almost exclusively, in relation to our 
great feud with Napoleon — that Coleridge adhered to the 
Tories. But because this feud was so capital and so earth- 
shaking a quarrel, that it occupied all hearts and all the coun- 
cils of Christendom, suffering no other question almost to live 
in its neighbourhood, hence it happened that he who acceded 
to the Tories in this one chapter of their policy, was regarded 
as an ally in the most general sense. Domestic politics were 
then, in fact, forgotten; no question, in any proper sense a 
Tory one, ever arose in that era; or, if it had, the public atten- 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 363 

tion would not have settled upon it; and it would speedily have 
been dismissed. 

Hence I deduce as a possibility, and, from my knowledge 
of Coleridge, I deduce it as a fact, that his adhesion to the 
Tories was bounded by his approbation of their foreign policy; 
and even of that — rarely in its executive details, rarely even 
in its military plans, (for these he assailed with more keenness 
of criticism than to me the case seemed to justify,) but solely 
in its animating principle — its moving and sustaining force, 
viz. the doctrine and entire faith that Napoleon Bonaparte 
ought to be resisted, was not a proper object of diplomacy or 
negotiation, and could be resisted hopefully and triumphantly. 
Thus far he went along with the Tories: in all else he belonged 
quite as much to other parties — so far as he belonged to any. 
And that he did not follow any bias of private interest in con- 
necting himself with Tories, or rather in allowing Tories to 
connect themselves with him, appears (rather more indeed than 
it ought to have appeared) on the very surface of his life. 
From Tory munificence he drew nothing at all, unless it should 
be imputed to his Tory connections that George IV selected 
him for one of his academicians. But this slight mark of 
royal favour, he owed, I believe, to other considerations; and 
I have reason to think that this way of treating political ques- 
tions, so wide of dogmatism, and laying open so vast a field 
to scepticism that might else have gone unregarded, must have 
been held as evidence of too latitudinarian a creed to justify a 
title to Toryism. And, upon the whole, I am of opinion, that 
few events of Mr. Coleridge's life were better calculated to place 
his disinterested pursuit of truth in a luminous aspect. In 
fact, his carelessness of all worldly interests was too notorious 
to leave him open to suspicions of that nature: nor was this 
carelessness kept within such limits as to be altogether merit- 
orious. There is no doubt that his indolence concurred, in 
some degree, to that line of conduct and to that political reserve 
which would, at all events, have been pursued, in a degree 
beyond what honour the severest, or delicacy the most ner- 
vous, could have enjoined. 

It is a singular anecdote, after all, to report of Coleridge, 
who incurred the reproach of having ratted solely by his 
inability to follow the friends of his early days into what his 
heart regarded as a monstrous and signal breach of patriotism, 
that in any eminent sense he was not a patriot. His under- 
standing in this, as in many instances, was too active, too rest- 
less for any abiding feelings to lay hold of him, unless when 



364 DE QUINCEY 

they coincided with some palpable command of nature. Parental 
love, for instance, was too holy a thing to be submitted for 
an instant to any scrutiny or any jealousy of his hair-splitting 
understanding. But it must be something as sacred and as 
profound as that which with Coleridge could long support the 
endless attrition of his too active intellect. In this instance, he 
had the same defect, derived in part from the same cause, as 
a contemporary, one of the idols of the day, more celebrated, 
and more widely celebrated, than Coleridge, but far his inferior 
in power and compass of intellect. I speak of Goethe: he also 
was defective, and defective under far stronger provocations 
and excitement, in patriotic feeling. He cared little for 
Weimar — and less for Germany. And he was, thus far, much 
below Coleridge — that the passion, which he could not feel, 
Coleridge yet obliged himself practically to obey in all things 
which concerned the world; whereas, Goethe disowned this 
passion equally in his acts — his words — and his writings. 
Both are now gone — Goethe and Coleridge; both are honoured 
by those who knew them, and by multitudes who did not. 
But the honours of Coleridge are perennial, and will annually 
grow more verdant; whilst from those of Goethe every genera- 
tion will see something fall away, until posterity will wonder at 
the subverted idol, whose basis being hollow and unsound, 
will leave the worship of their fathers an enigma to their 
descendants. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 



IN 1807 it was, at the beginning of winter, that I first saw 
William Wordsworth. I have already mentioned that I 
had introduced myself to his notice by letter as early as 
the spring of 1803. To this hour it has continued, I 
believe, a mystery to Wordsworth, why it was that I 
suffered an interval of four and a half years to slip away 
before availing myself of the standing invitation with which 
I had been honoured to the poet's house. Very probably 
he accounted for this delay by supposing that the new- 
born liberty of an Oxford life, with its multiplied enjoy- 
ments, acting upon a boy just emancipated from the restraints 
of a school, and, in one hour, elevated into what we 
Oxonians so proudly and so exclusively^ denominate a 
" man," might have tempted ' me into pursuits alien from the 
pure intellectual passions which had so powerfully mastered my 
youthful heart some years before. Extinguished such a pas- 
sion could not be; nor could he think, if remembering the 
fervour with which I had expressed it, the sort of " nympho- 
lepsy" which had seized upon me, and which, in some imperfect 
way, I had avowed with reference to the very origin of lakes and 
mountains, amongst which the scenery of this most original 
poetry had chiefly grown up and moved. The very names of 
the ancient hills — Fairfield, Seat Sandal, Helvellyn, Blen- 
cathara, Glaramara; of the sequestered glens — such as Bor- 
rowdale, Martindale, Mardale, Wasdale, and Ennerdale; but, 
above all, the shy pastoral recesses, not gairishly in the world's 
eye, like Windermere, or Derwentwater, but lurking half 
unknown to the traveller of that day — Grasmere, for instance, 
the lovely abode of the poet himself, solitary, and yet sowed, as 
it were, with a thin diffusion of humble dwellings — here a 
scattering, and there a clustering, as in the starry heavens — 
sufficient to afford, at every turn and angle, human remem- 
brances and memorials of time-honoured affections, or of pas- 
sions, (as the "Churchyard amongst the Mountains" will amply 
demonstrate) — not wanting even in scenic and tragical inter- 

365 



366 DE QUINCEY 

est: — these were so many local spells upon me, equally poetic 
and elevating with the Miltonic names of Valdarno and Val- 
lombrosa, whilst, in addition to that part of their power, they 
had a separate fascination, under the anticipation that very 
probably I might here form personal ties which would forever 
connect me with their sweet solitudes by powers deep as life and 
awful as death. 

Oh! sense of mysterious pre-existence, by which, through 
years in which as yet a stranger to these valleys of Westmore- 
land, I viewed myself as a phantom-self — a second identity 
projected from my own consciousness, and already living 
amongst them! — how was it, and by what prophetic instinct, 
that already I said to myself oftentimes, when chasing day- 
dreams along the pictures of these wild mountainous laby- 
rinths, which as yet I had not traversed — Here, in some distant 
year, I shall be shaken with love, and there with stormiest 
grief? — whence was it that sudden revelations came upon me, 
like the drawing-up of a curtain, and closing again as rapidly, 
of scenes that made the future heaven of my Hfe? — and how 
was it that in thought I was and yet in reality was not a 
denizen, already, in 1803, 1804, 1805, of lakes and forest lawns 
which I never saw till 1807? — and that, by a prophetic instinct 
of the heart, I rehearsed and lived over, as it were, in vision, 
those chapters of my life which have carried with them the 
weightiest burthen of joy and sorrow, and by the margin of 
those very lakes and hills with which I prefigured this connec- 
tion? — and, in short, that for me, by a transcendent privilege, 
during the novitiate of my life, most truly I might say 

"In to-day already walked to-morrow?" 

Deep are the voices which seem to call, deep is the lesson which 
would be taught even to the most thoughtless of men, by "any 
gladsome field of earth " which he may chance to traverse, if 
(according to the supposition' of Wordsworth) that field, so 
gay to him, 

" Show to his eye an image of the pangs 
Which it hath witnessed; render back an echo 
Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod." 

But, if this recall of the real be affecting, much more so to me 
is this aerial and shadowy anticipation of the future, when 
looked back upon from far distance through a multitude of 
years, and when confirmed for the great outlines of its sketches 
by the impassioned experience of life. Why I should hav€ 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 367 

done so, I can hardly say; but that I did — even before I had 
visited Grasmere, and whilst it was almost certain, from the 
sort of channel in which my life seemed destined to flow, that 
London would be the central region of my hopes and fears — 
even then I turned to Grasmere and its dependencies as knit 
up, in some way as yet unknown, with my future destinies. 
Of this, were it not that it would wear a superstitious air, I 
could mention a very memorable proof from the records of 
my life in 1804, full three and a half years before I saw Gras- 
mere. However, I allude to that fact in this place by way of 
showing that Oxford had not weaned my thoughts from the 
northern mountains and their great inhabitants; and that my 
delay was due to anything rather than to waning interest. On 
the contrary, the real cause of my delay was the too great pro- 
fundity, and the increasing profundity, of my interest in this 
regeneration of our national poetry; and the increasing awe, 
in due proportion to the decaying thoughtlessness of boyhood, 
which possessed me for the character of its author. So far 
from neglecting Wordsworth, it is a fact (and Professor Wil- 
son — who, without knowing me in those or for many subse- 
quent years, shared my feelings towards both the poetry and 
the poet — has a story of his own experience, somewhat similar, 
to report) — it is a fact, I say, that twice I had undertaken a 
long journey expressly for the purpose of paying my respects 
to Wordsworth: twice I came so far as the little rustic inn (at 
that time the sole inn of the neighbourhood) at Church Coniston 
— the village which stands at the north-western angle of Con- 
iston Water; and on neither occasion could I summon confi- 
dence enough to present myself before him. It was not that I 
had any want of proper boldness for facing the most numerous 
company of a mixed or ordinary character: reserved indeed I 
was, and too much so, perhaps even shy — from the character 
of my mind, so profoundly meditative, and the character of my 
life, so profoundly sequestered: but still, from counteracting 
causes, I was not deficient in a reasonable self-confidence 
towards the world generally. But the very image of Words- 
worth, as I prefigured it to my own planet-struck eye, crushed 
my faculties as before Elijah or St. Paul. Twice, as I have 
said, did I advance as far as the Lake of Coniston, which is 
about eight miles from the church of Grasmere, and once I 
absolutely went forwards from Coniston to the very gorge of 
Hammerscar, from which the whole vale of Grasmere sud- 
denly breaks upon the view in a style of almost theatrical sur- 
prise, with its lovely valley stretching in the distance, the lake 



368 DE QUINCEY 

lying immediately below, with its solemn boat-like island of five 
acres in size, seemingly floating on the surface; its exquisite out- 
line on the opposite shore, revealing all its little bays " and wide 
sylvan margin, feathered to the edge with wild flowers and 
ferns. In one quarter, a little wood, stretching for about half 
a mile towards the outlet of the lake, more directly in opposition 
to the spectator; a few green fields; and beyond them, just 
two bowshots from the water, a little white cottage gleaming 
from the midst of trees with a vast and seemingly never-ending 
series of ascents, rising above it to the height of more than 
three thousand feet. That little cottage was Wordsworth's 
from the time of his marriage, and earlier — in fact, from the 
beginning of the century to the year 1808. Afterwards, for 
many a year, it was mine. Catching one hasty glimpse of this 
loveliest of landscapes, I retreated like a guilty thing, for fear 
I might be surprised by Wordsworth, and then returned faint- 
heartedly to Coniston, and so to Oxford, re infecta. 

This was in 1806. And thus far, from mere excess of 
nervous distrust in my own powers for sustaining a con- 
versation with Wordsworth, I had, for nearly five years, shrunk 
from a meeting for which, beyond all things under heaven, I 
longed. These, the reader will say, were foolish feelings. 
Why, yes; perhaps they were; but they had a laudable founda- 
tion; for I carried my modesty to a laughable excess undoubt- 
edly; but yet it was modesty which co-operated with other feel- 
ings to produce my foolish panic. I had lived in profounder 
solitude than can have fallen to the lot of many people, which 
arose from the unusual defect of sympathy I found in all around 
me; and this solitude gave a preternatural depth to my master 
feelings, which originally were deep enough, and, to speak 
phrenologically, the organ of veneration must have received an 
inordinate development in my case. However, say what one 
can for it, no doubt my conduct was very absurd; and I began 
to think so myself. I fancied continually a plain, honest, old 
relative saying to me — " Let the man be a god even, he will 
show himself very little of a good one if he is not satisfied with 
a devotion such as yours. You oflfer him almost a blamable 
adoration. What more can he require? And if more he does 
require, hang me if I wouldn't think myself too good for any 
man's scorn; and, after one trial of it, I would wish him good 
morning for ever." Still I witnessed a case where a kind of idol 
had, after all, rejected an idolator that did not offer a splendid 
triumph to his pride; and with the additional cruelty of slight- 
ing this worshipper in behalf of one more brilliant, who seemed 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 369 

in great doubt whether he should admire or not. And, 
although I thought better of Mr. Wordsworth's moral nature 
than to suppose it possible for him to err in this extent, or 
even with this kind of insolence, yet I could not reconcile myself 
to the place of an humble admirer, valued, perhaps, for the 
right direction of his feelings, but practically neglected in 
behalf of some more gifted companion, who might have the 
power (which much I feared that I should never have) of talk- 
ing to him on something like equal terms, as respected the laws 
and principles of poetry. I could bear well enough to be 
undervalued, or evenly openly scorned; for, said I to myself, it 
is the lot of every man in this world to be scorned by some- 
body; and also, to balance that misfortune, every man has a 
chance of one worshipper. "J," says Sir Andrew Aguecheek — 
" I was adored once." Yes, even Aguecheek had his one 
and there is not that immeasurable fool in this world, but that 
(according to La Fontaine's consolatory doctrine) he has a fair 
chance for finding " un plus grand sot que luimeme." 

But with all this equanimity in my expectation and demands, 
philosophically as I could have reconciled myself to contempt, 
there was a limit. People there were in this world whose 
respect I could not dispense with: people also there have been 
in this world (alas! alas!) whose love was to me no less indis- 
pensable. Have it I must, or life would have had no value in 
my eyes. Was I then so deficient in conversational power 
that I could not hope to acquit myself respectably? In that 
respect, it is a singularity in which (if I may presume, even for 
a defect, to compare myself with so great a man) I resembled 
Wordsworth — namely, that in early youth I laboured under a 
peculiar embarrassment and penury of words, when I sought to 
convey my thoughts adequately upon interesting subjects: 
neither was it words only that I wanted : but I could not unravel, 
I could not even make perfectly conscious to myself, or prop- 
erly arrange the subsidiary thoughts into which one leading 
thought often radiates; or, at least, I could not do this with 
anything like the rapidity requisite for conversation. I laboured 
like a Sybil instinct with the burden of prophetic woe, as often 
as I found myself dealing with any topic in which the under- 
standing combined with deep feelings to suggest mixed and 
tangled thoughts : and thus partly — partly also from my invin- 
cible habit of reverie — at that era of my life, I had a most 
distinguished talent 'pour le silence.' Wordsworth, from 
something of the same causes, suffered (by his own report to 
myself) at the same age from pretty much the same infirmity. 
24 



370 DE QUINCE Y 

And yet, in more advanced years — probably about twenty- 
eight or thirty — both of us acquired a remarkable fluency in 
the art of unfolding our thoughts colloquially. However, at 
that period my deficiencies were what I have described. And 
after all, though I had no absolute cause for anticipating con- 
tempt, I was so far right in my fears, that since that time I have 
had occasion to perceive a worldly tone of sentiment in Words- 
worth, not less than in Mrs. Hannah More and other literary 
people, by which they were led to set a higher value upon a 
limited respect from a person high in the world's esteem, than 
upon the most lavish spirit of devotion from an obscure quar- 
ter. Now, in that point, my feelings are far otherwise; and, 
though it is praising myself to say so, yet say it I must, because 
it is mere truth — that, if a fool were so far to honour me as to 
profess, in Sir Andrew Aguecheek's phrase, even to " adore " 
me — yes, though it were Sir Andrew himself — I should say, 
" My poor fool ! thy adoration will do me but little good in this 
world; yet, to know that thy whole heart's wealth is given up 
to me, that forces me to value thy homage more than I would 
that of Solomon in all his glory." 

Meantime, the world went on; events kept moving: and, 
amongst them, in the course of 1807, occurred the event of 
Mr. Coleridge's return to England from his official station in 
the Governor's family at Malta; my introduction to his 
acquaintance at Bridgewater, where he was then (summer of 
1807) visiting, together with his family, amongst old Somerset- 
shire friends; his subsequent journey to Bristol, near which (at 
the Hot Wells) I was then staying with a female relation ; and, 
finally, upon discovering that he was anxious to put his wife 
and children under some friendly escort, on their return home- 
wards to Keswick, (he himself being summoned to execute an 
engagement to lecture at the Royal Institution during the 
coming winter,) I offered to unite with Mrs. Coleridge in a 
post-chaise to the north. My offer was readily accepted, and, 
at the latter end of October, we set forwards — Mrs. Coleridge, 
viz. with her two surviving sons — Hartley, aged nine, the 
oldest; Derwent, about seven — her beautiful little daughter,^ 
about five; and finally, myself. Going by the direct route 
through Gloucester, Bridgewater, etc., on the third day we 
reached Liverpool, where I took up my quarters at a hotel, 
whilst Mrs. Coleridge paid a visit of a few days to a very 
interesting family, friends of Southey. These were the Misses 
Koster, daughters of an English gold merchant of celebrity, 
who had recently quitted Portugal on the approach of the 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 37 1 

French army under Junot. Mr. Koster did me the honour to 
call at my quarters, and invite me to his house; an invitation 
which I very readily accepted, and had thus an opportunity of 
becoming acquainted with a family the most accomplished I 
had ever known. At dinner, there appeared only the family 
party, several daughters, and one son, a fine young man of 
twenty, but who was consciously dying of asthma. Mr. Kos- 
ter, the head of the family, was distinguished for his good 
sense and practical information; but, in Liverpool, still more 
so by his eccentric and obstinate denial of certain notorious 
events ; in particular, he denied that any such battle as Talavera 
had ever been fought, and had a large wager depending upon 
the result. His house was the resort of distinguished foreign- 
ers; and, on the first evening of my dining there, as well as 
afterwards, I there met, for the first time and for the last, that 
marvel of women, Madame Catalini. I had heard her repeat- 
edly; but never before been near enough to see her smile and 
converse — even to be honoured with a smile myself. She and 
Lady Hamilton were the most effectively brilhant women I 
ever saw. However, on this occasion the Misses Koster out- 
shone even la Catalini; to her they talked in the most fluent 
Italian; to some foreign men, in Portuguese; to one in French; 
and to most of the party in English; and each, by turns, 
seemed to be their native tongue. Nor did they shrink, even 
in the presence of the mighty enchantress and siren, from 
exhibiting their musical skill. 

From Liverpool, after about a week's delay, we pursued our 
journey northwards. We had slept on the first day at Lan- 
caster. Consequently, at the rate of motion which then pre- 
vailed throughout England — which, however, was rarely 
equalled on that road, where all things were in arrear by com- 
parison with the eastern and southern roads of the kingdom — 
we naturally enough found ourselves about three o'clock in the 
afternoon, at Ambleside, fourteen miles to the north of Kendal, 
and thirty-six from our sleeping quarters. There, for the last 
time, we stopped to change horses, a ceremony which then took 
half an hour; and, about four o'clock, we found ourselves on the 
summit of the White Moss, a hill which rises between the second 
and third mile-stones on the stage from Ambleside to Kes- 
wick, and which then retarded the traveller's advance by a full 
fifteen minutes, but is now evaded by a lower line of road. In 
ascending this hill, from weariness of moving so slowly, I, with 
the two Coleridges, had alighted ; and, as we all chose to stretch 
our legs by running down the hill, we had left the chaise behind 



372 DE QUINCEY 

US, and had even lost the sound of the wheels at times, when 
all at once we came, at an abrupt turn of the road, in sight of 
a white cottage, with two solemn yew-trees breaking the glare 
of its white walls. A sudden shock seized me on recognizing 
this cottage, of which, in the previous year, I had gained a 
momentary glimpse from Hammerscar, on the opposite side 
of the lake. I paused, and felt my old panic returning upon 
me; but just then, as if to take away all doubt upon the sub- 
ject, I saw Hartley Coleridge, who had gained upon me con- 
siderably during my pause of hesitation, suddenly turn in at 
a garden gate; and, just then, the chaise, which had been rat- 
tling furiously down the descent, according to the invariable 
practice of Westmoreland drivers, (for in Westmoreland they 
never lock down the steepest descents, and therefore rightly 
keep up their horses at a flying gallop,) suddenly turned a cor- 
ner of the road and came into sight: at the same moment Mrs. 
Coleridge waved her hand from one of the front windows ; and 
the direction of this motion to the right, at once confirmed me 
in my belief that here at last we had reached our port; that 
this little cottage was tenanted by that man whom, of all the 
men from the beginning of time, I most fervently desired to 
see; that, in less than a minute, I should meet Wordsworth 
face to face. Coleridge was of opinion that, if a man were 
really and consciously to see an apparition — supposing, I 
mean, the case to be a physical possibility that a spiritual 
essence should be liable to the action of material organs — in 
such circumstances death would be the inevitable result; and, 
if so, the wish which we hear so commonly expressed for such 
experience is as thoughtless as that of Semele in the Grecian 
mythology, so natural in a female, that her lover should visit 
her en grand costume, and " with his tail on " — presumptuous 
ambition, that unexpectedly wrought its own ruinous chastise- 
ment! Judged by Coleridge's test, my situation could not have 
been so terrific as his who anticipates a ghost — for, certainly^ 
I survived this meeting; but, at that instant, it seemed pretty 
much the same to my own feelings. 

Never before or since can I reproach myself with having 
trembled at the approaching presence of any creature that is 
born of woman, excepting only, for once or twice in my life, 
woman herself; now, however, I did tremble; and I forgot, 
what in no other circumstances I could have forgotten, to stop 
for the coming up of the chaise, that I might be ready to hand 
Mrs. Coleridge out. Had Charlemagne and all his Peerage 
been behind me, or Caesar and his equipage, or Death on his 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 373 

pale horse, I should have forgotten them at that moment of 
intense expectation, and of eyes fascinated to what lay before 
me, or what might in a moment appear. Through the little 
gate I pressed forward; ten steps beyond it lay the principal 
door of the house. To this, no longer clearly conscious of my 
own feelings, I passed on rapidly; I heard a step, a voice, and, 
like a flash of lightning, I sav/ the figure emerge of a tallish 
man, who held out his hand, and saluted me with the most 
cordial manner, and the warmest expression of friendly wel- 
come, that it is possible to imagine. The chaise, however, 
drawing up to the gate at that moment, he (and there needed 
no Roman nomenclator, to tell me that this he, the owner of 
this noble countenance, was Wordsworth,) felt himself sum- 
moned as master of the hospitalities on the occasion, to advance 
and receive Mrs. Coleridge. I, therefore, stunned almost with 
the actual accomplishment of a catastrophe so long anticipated 
and so long postponed, mechanically went forward into the 
house. A little semi-vestibule between two doors prefaced the 
entrance into what might be considered the principal room of 
the cottage. It was an oblong square, not above eight and a 
half feet high, sixteen feet long, and twelve broad; very prettily 
wainscoted from the floor to the ceiHng with dark poHshed oak, 
slightly embellished with carving. One window there was — a 
perfect and unpretending cottage window, with little diamond 
panes, embowered, at almost every season of the year, with 
roses; and, in the summer and autumn, with a profusion of 
jessamine and other fragrant shrubs. From the exuberant 
luxuriance of the vegetation around it, and from the dark hue 
of the wainscoting, this window, though tolerably large, did 
not furnish a very powerful light to one who entered from the 
open air. However, I saw sufficiently to be aware of two ladies 
just entering the room, from a doorway opening upon a little 
staircase. The foremost, a tall young woman, with the most 
winning expression of benignity upon her features that I had 
ever beheld, made a slight curtsey, and advanced to me, pre- 
senting her hand with so frank an air that all embarrassment 
must have fled in a moment, before the native goodness of her 
manner. This was Mrs. Wordsworth, cousin of the poet; and, 
for the last five years or more, his wife. She was now mother 
of two children, a son and a daughter; and she furnished a 
remarkable proof how possible it is for a woman neither hand- 
some nor even comely, according to the rigour of criticism — 
nay, generally pronounced very plain — to exercise all the 
practical power and fascination of beauty, through the mere 



374 ^^ QUINCEY 

compensatory charms of sweetness all but angelic, of sim- 
plicity the most entire, womanly self-respect, and purity of 
heart speaking through all her looks, acts, and movements. 
Words, I was going to have added; but her words were few. 
In reality, she talked so little, that Mr. Slave-Trade Clarkson 
used to say of her that she could only say " God bless you ! " 
Certainly her intellect was not of an active order; but, in a 
quiescent, reposing, meditative way, she appeared always to 
have a genial enjoyment from her own thoughts; and it would 
have been strange indeed if she, who enjoyed such eminent 
advantages of training, from the daily society of her husband 
and his sister, not only hearing the best parts of English lit- 
erature daily read, or quoted by short fragments, but also 
hearing them very often critically discussed in a style of great 
originality and truth, and by the light of strong poetic feel- 
ing — strange it would have been had any person, though dull 
as the weeds of Lethe in the native constitution of his mind, 
failed to acquire some power of judging for himself, and put- 
ting forth some functions of activity. But undoubtedly that 
was not her element: to feel and to enjoy in a luxurious repose 
of mind — there was her forte and her peculiar privilege; and 
how much better this was adapted to her husband's taste, how 
much more adapted to uphold the comfort of his daily life, than 
a blue-stocking loquacity, or even a legitimate talent for dis- 
cussion and analytic skill, may be inferred from his celebrated 
verses, beginning 

" She was a phantom of delight 
When first she gleam'd upon my sight; " 

and ending with this matchless winding up of an intellectual 
homage, involving a description of an almost ideal wife 

" A perfect woman, nobly plann'd 
To warn, to comfort, to command; 
And yet "— 

going back to a previous thought, and resuming a leading 
impression of the whole character 

" And yet a spirit too, and bright 
With something of an angel light." 

From these verses, I say, it may be inferred what were the 
qualities which won Wordsworth's admiration in a wife; for 
these verses were written upon Mary Hutchinson, his own 
cousin, and his wife; and not written, as Coleridge's moveable 
verses upon "Sara," for some forgotten original Sara, and sub- 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 375 



sequently transferred to every other Sara who caine across his 
path Once for all,' these exquisite lines were dedicated to 
Mrs Wordsworth; were understood to describe her -to have 
been prompted by the feminine graces of her character; hers 
they are? and will remain forever. To these, therefore, I may 
refer the reader for an idea, by infinite degrees more powerfu 
and vivid than I could give him, of what was m^V'^^.Td ?o 
fn the partner and second self of the poet A"d I sh^ll add to 
this abstract of her moral portrait these few ~n=l"f/"g ^^f ^ 
of her appearance in a physical sense She was ^11 - Aat^I 
have already said; her figure was good -except that, for iny 
taTe, it was rathe; too slender, and so it always continued In 
complexion she was fair; and there was sornethmg pecuharly 
Xsing even in this accident of the skin for it was acconi- 
panied by an animated expression of health, a blessing which 
Fn fact, she possessed uninterruptedly, very pleasmg in itself 
Lnd abo a powerful auxiliary of that smiling benignity which 
constituted the greatest attraction of her person. Her eyes 
— the reader may already know— her eyes — 

" Like stars of twilight fair; . 

Like twilight, too, her dark brown hair; 
But all things else about her drawn 
From May-time and the cheerful dawn. 

But strange it is to tell that, in these eyes of vesper gentleness 
there was a considerable obliquity of vision ; and much beyond 
that slight obliquity which is often supposed to be an attractive 
foible of the countenance: and yet, though it ought to have 
been displeasing or repulsive, in fact it was not. Indeed all 
faults, had they been ten times more and greater, would have 
been ;wallowed up or neutralized by that supreme expression of 
her features, to the intense unity of which every lineament in 
the fixed parts, and every undulation in the moving parts, or 
play of her countenance, concurred - viz. a sum/ be^'gn'ty - 
a radiant gracefulness - such as in this world I never saw 

^^"Hte' ^nTrefder has a sketch of Mrs. WordswortK 
Immedi^ately behind her, moved a lady, """ch shorter much 
slighter, and perhaps, in all other respects, as different from her 
in personal characteristics as could have been wished for the 
most effective contrast. " Her face was of Egyptian brown; 
Tre y in a woman of English birth, had I seen a more deter- 
mined gipsy tan. Her eyes were not soft as Mrs. Words- 
worth's nor were they fierce or bold; but they were wild and 
startling, and hurried in their motion. Her manner was warm 



376 DE QUINCE Y 

and even ardent; her sensibility seemed constitutionally deep; 
and some subtle fire of impassioned intellect apparently burned 
within her, which, being alternately pushed forward into a con- 
spicuous expression by the irrepressible instincts of her tem- 
perament, and then immediately checked, in obedience to the 
decorum of her sex and age, and her maidenly condition, (for 
she had rejected all ofifers of marriage, out of pure sisterly 
regard to her brother and his children,) gave to her whole de- 
meanour and to her conversation, an air of embarrassment and 
even of self-conflict, that was sometimes distressing to witness. 
Even her very utterance and enunciation often, or rather gen- 
erally, suffered in point of clearness and steadiness, from the 
agitation of her excessive organic sensibility, and, perhaps, 
from some morbid irritability of the nerves. At times, the self- 
counteraction and self-baffling of her feelings caused her even 
to stammer, and so determinately to stammer, that a stranger 
who should have seen her and quitted her in that state of feel- 
ing, would have certainly set her down for one plagued with 
that infirmity of speech, as distressingly as Charles Lamb him- 
self. This was Miss Wordsworth, the only sister of the poet — 
his "Dorothy;" who naturally owed so much to the life-long 
intercourse with her great brother, in his most solitary and 
sequestered years; but, on the other hand, to whom he has 
acknowledged obligations of the profoundest nature; and, in 
particular, this mighty one, through which we also, the admir- 
ers and the worshippers through every age of this great poet, 
are become equally her debtors — that whereas the intellect of 
Wordsworth was, by its original tendencies, too stern — too 
austere — too much enamoured of an ascetic harsh sublimity, 
she it was — the lady who paced by his side continually through 
sylvan and mountain tracks, in Highland glens, and in the 
dim recesses of German charcoal-burners — that first couched 
his eye to the sense of beauty — humanized him by the gentler 
charities, and engrafted, with her delicate female touch, those 
graces upon the ruder growths of his nature, which have since 
clothed the forest of his genius with a foliage corresponding in 
loveliness and beauty to the strength of its boughs and the 
massiveness of its trunks. The greatest deductions from Miss 
Wordsworth's attractions, and from the exceeding interest 
which surrounded her in right of her character, her history, 
and the relation which she fulfilled towards her brother, was the 
glancing quickness of her motions, and other circumstances in 
her deportment, (such as her stooping attitude when walking,) 
which gave an ungraceful, and even an unsexual character to 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 377 

her appearance when out of doors. She did not cultivate the 
graces which preside over the person and its carriage. But, 
on the other hand, she was a person of very remarkable endow- 
ments intellectually; and, in addition to the other great ser- 
vices which she rendered to her brother, this I may mention, 
as greater than all the rest, and it was one which equally oper- 
ated to the benefit of every casual companion in a walk — viz. 
the exceeding sympathy, always ready and always profound, 
by which she made all that one could tell her, all that one could 
describe, all that one could quote from a foreign author, rever- 
berate as it were a plusieurs reprises, to one's own feelings by 
the manifest impression it made upon her. The pulses of light 
are not more quick or more inevitable in their flow and undula- 
tion, than were the answering and echoing movements of her 
sympathizing attention. Her knowledge of literature was 
irregular, and not systematically built up. She was content 
to be ignorant of many things; but what she knew and had 
really mastered, lay where it could not be disturbed — in the 
temper of her own most fervid heart. In whatever I say or 
shall say of Miss Wordsworth, the reader may understand me 
to have the entire sanction and concurrence of Professor Wil- 
son. We both knew Miss, Wordsworth well; and we heartily 
agreed in admiring her. 

Such were the two ladies, who, with himself and two children, 
and at that time one servant, composed the poet's household. 
They were both somewhere about twenty-eight years old; and 
if the reader inquires about the single point which I have left 
untouched in their portraiture — viz. the style of their man- 
ners — I may say that it was in some points, naturally of a 
plain household simplicity, but everyway pleasing, unaffected, 
and (as respects Mrs. Wordsworth) even dignified. Few per- 
sons had seen so little as this lady of the world. She had seen 
nothing of high life, for she had seen none at all. Conse- 
quently, she was unacquainted with the conventional modes of 
behaviour, prescribed in particular situations by high breeding. 
But, as these modes are little more than the product of dispas- 
sionate good sense, applied to the circumstances of the case, 
it is surprising how few deficiencies are perceptible, even to the 
most vigilant eye — or, at least, essential deficiencies — in the 
general demeanour of any unaffected young woman, acting 
habitually under a sense of sexual dignity, courtesy, pure tastes, 
and elegant enjoyments, assisted by the daily counsel and 
revision of a masculine intellect, in the person of a brother or 
a husband. Miss Wordsworth had seen most of life, and even 



378 DE QUINCEY 

of good company; for she had. lived, when quite a girl, under 
the protection of a near relation at Windsor, who was a per- 
sonal favourite of the royal family, and especially of George III. 
Consequently she ought to have been the more poHshed of the 
two; and yet, from greater natural aptitudes for refinement of 
manner in her sister-in-law, and partly, perhaps, from her more 
quiet and subdued manner, Mrs. Wordsworth would have 
been pronounced the more ladylike person. 

From the interest which attaches to every person so nearly 
connected as these two ladies with a great poet, I have allowed 
myself a larger latitude than else might have been justifiable in 
describing them. I now go on with my narrative: 

I was ushered up a little flight of stairs, fourteen in all, to a 
little dining-room, or whatever the reader chooses to call it. 
Wordsworth himself has described the fire-place of this as his 

*' Half-kitchen and half-parlor fire," 

It was not fully seven feet six inches high, and, in other respects, 
pretty nearly of the same dimensions as the rustic hall below. 
There was, however, in a small recess, a library of perhaps 
three hundred volumes, which seemed to consecrate the room 
as the poet's study and composing room; and so occasionally 
it was. But far oftener he both studied, as I found, and com- 
posed on the high road. I had not been two minutes at the 
fireside, when in came Wordsworth, returning from his friendly 
attentions to the travellers below, who, it seemed, had been 
over-persuaded by hospitable solicitations to stay for this night 
in Grasmere, and to make out the remaining thirteen miles of 
their road to Keswick on the following day. Wordsworth 
entered. And " what-like " — to use a Westmoreland, as well 
as a Scottish expression — "what-like" was Wordsworth? A 
reviewer in "Tait's Magazine," in noticing some recent collection 
of literary portraits, gives it as his opinion that Charles Lamb's 
head was the finest amongst them. This remark may have 
been justified by the engraved portraits; but, certainly, the 
critic would have cancelled it had he seen the original heads — 
at least, had he seen them in youth or in maturity; for Charles 
Lamb bore age with less disadvantage to the intellectual expres- 
sion of his appearance than Wordsworth, in whom a sanguine, 
or rather coarse complexion, (or rather not complexion, prop- 
erly speaking, so much as texture of flesh,) has, of late years, 
usurped upon the original bronze-tint and finer skin; and this 
change of hue and change in the quality of skin, has been made 
fourfold more conspicuous, and more unfavourable in its general 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 379 

effect, by the harsh contrast of grizzled hair which has dis- 
placed the original brown. No change in personal appear- 
ance can ever have been so unfortunate; for, generally speak- 
ing, whatever other disadvantages old age may bring along 
with it, one effect, at least, in male subjects, has a compen- 
sating tendency — that it removes any tone of vigour too harsh, 
and mitigates the expression of power too unsubdued. But, in 
Wordsworth, the effect of the change has been to substitute an 
air of animal vigour, or, at least, hardiness, as if derived from 
constant exposure to the wind and weather, for the fine, sombre 
complexion which he once had, resembling that of a Venetian 
senator or a Spanish monk. 

Here, however, in describing the personal appearance of 
Wordsworth, I go back, of course, to the point of time at 
which I am speaking. To begin with his figure: — Words- 
worth was, upon the whole, not a well-made man. His legs 
were pointedly condemned by all the female connoisseurs in legs 
that ever I heard lecture upon that topic; not that they were 
bad in any way which would force itself upon your notice — 
there was no absolute deformity about them; and undoubtedly 
they had been serviceable legs beyond the average standard 
of human requisition ; for I calculate, upon good data, that with 
these identical legs Wordsworth must have traversed a dis- 
tance of 175 to 180,000 English miles — a mode of exertion 
which, to him, stood in the stead of wine, spirits, and all other 
stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; to which he has 
been indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for 
much of what is most excellent in his writings. But, useful as 
they have proved themselves, the Wordsworthian legs were cer- 
tainly not ornamental ; and it was really a pity, as I agreed with 
a lady in thinking, that he had not another pair for evening 
dress parties — when no boots lend their friendly aid to masque 
our imperfections from the eyes of female rigourists — the ele- 
gantes formarum spectatrices. A sculptor would certainly 
have disapproved of their contour. But the worst part of 
Wordsworth's person was the bust : there was a narrowness and 
a droop about the shoulders which became striking, and had 
an effect of meanness when brought into close juxtaposition 
with a figure of a most statuesque order. Once on a summer 
morning, walking in the vale of Langdale with Wordsworth, 

his sister, and Mr. J , a native Westmoreland clergyman, I 

remember that Miss Wordsworth was positively mortified by 
the peculiar illustration which settled upon this defective con- 
formation. Mr. J , a fine towering figure, six feet high, 



380 DE QUINCE Y 

massy and columnar in his proportions, happened to be walk- 
ing, a little in advance, with Wordsworth; Miss Wordsworth 
and myself being in the rear; and from the nature of the con- 
versation which then prevailed in our front rank, something" 
or other about money, devises, buying and selling, we of the 
rear-guard thought it requisite to preserve this arrangement 
for a space of three miles or more; during which time, at inter- 
vals. Miss Wordsworth would exclaim, in a tone of vexation, 
"Is it possible? — can that be William? How very mean he 
looks !" and could not conceal a mortification that seemed really 
painful, until I for my part, could not forbear laughing outright 
at the serious interest which she carried into this trifle. She 
was, however, right, as regarded the mere visual judgment. 
Wordsworth's figure, with all its defects, was brought into 
powerful relief by one which had been cast in a more square 
and massy mould; and in such a case it impressed a spectator 
with a sense of absolute meanness, more especially when 
viewed from behind, and not counteracted by his countenance; 
and yet Wordsworth was of a good height, just five feet ten, 
and not a slender man; on the contrary, by the side of Southey 
his limbs looked thick, almost in a disproportionate degree. 
But the total effect of Wordsworth's person was always worst 
in a state of motion ; for, according to the remark I have heard 
from many country people, " he walked like a cade " — a cade 
being some sort of insect which advances by an oblique motion. 
This was not always perceptible, and in part depended (I 
believe) upon the position of his arms; when either of these 
happened (as was very customary) to be inserted into the unbut- 
toned waistcoat, his walk had a wry or twisted appearance ; and 
not appearance only — for I have known it, by slow degrees, 
gradually to edge off his companion from the middle to the side 
of the highroad.** Meantime, his face — that was one which 
would have made amends for greater defects of figure; it was 
certainly the noblest for intellectual effects that, in actual life, 
I have seen, or at least have consciously been led to notice. 
Many such, or even finer, I have seen amongst the portraits of 
Titian, and, in a later period, amongst those of Vandyke, from 
the great era of Charles I, as also from the court of Elizabeth 
and of Charles II; but none which has so much impressed me 
in my own time. 

Haydon, the eminent painter, in his great picture of "Christ's 
Entry into Jerusalem," has introduced Wordsworth in the char- 
acter of a disciple attending his Divine Master. This fact is 
well known, and as the picture itself is tolerably well known to 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 38 1 

the public eye, there are multitudes now living who will have 
seen a very impressive likeness of Wordsworth — some con- 
sciously, some not suspecting it. There will, however, always 
be many who have not seen any portrait at all of Wordsworth; 
and therefore I will describe its general outline and effect. It 
was a face of the long order, often falsely classed as oval ; but a 
greater mistake is made by many people in supposing the long 
face, which prevailed so remarkably in the Elizabethan and 
Carolinian periods, to have become extinct in our days, Miss 
Ferrier, in one of her brilliant novels, (" Marriage," I think,) 
makes a Highland girl protest that " no Englishman with his 
round face " shall ever wean her heart from her own country ; 
but England is not the land of round faces — and those have 
observed little indeed who think so : France it is that grows the 
round face, and in so large a majority of her provinces, that it 
has become one of the national characteristics. And the 
remarkable impression which an Englishman receives from the 
prevalence of the eternal orb of the human countenance, proves 
of itself, without any conscious testimony, how the fact stands; 
in the blind sense of a monotony, in this respect not usual else- 
where, lies involved an argument that cannot be gainsaid. 
Besides receiving this evidence from positive experience, even 
upon an a priori argument, how is it possible that the long face 
so prevalent in England, by all confession, in certain splendid 
eras of our history, should have had time, in some five or six 
generations, to grow extinct? Again, the character of face 
varies essentially in different provinces. Wales has no con- 
nection in this respect with Devonshire, nor Kent with York- 
shire, nor either with Westmoreland. England, it is true, tends 
beyond all known examples to a general amalgamation of dif- 
ferences by means of its unrivalled freedom of intercourse. 
Yet even in England, law and necessity have opposed as yet 
such and so many obstacles to the free diffusion of labour, that 
every generation occupies by at least five-sixths of its numbers 
the ground of its ancestors. 

The movable part of a population is chiefly the higher part; 
and it is the lower classes that, in every nation, compose the 
fundus, in which lies latent the national face as well as the 
national character. Each exists here in racy purity and integ- 
rity, not disturbed in the one by alien intermarriages, nor in the 
other by novelties of opinion or other casual effects derived 
from education and reading. Now, look into this fundus, and 
you will find, in many districts, no such prevalence of the round 
orbicular face as some people erroneously suppose: and in 



382 DE QUINCEY 

Westmoreland especially, the ancient long face of the Elizabe- 
than period, powerfully resembling in all its lineaments the 
ancient Roman face, and often (though not so uniformly) the 
face of northern Italy in modern times. The face of Sir Walter 
Scott, as Irving, the pulpit orator, once remarked to me, was 
the indigenous face of the Border: the mouth, which was bad, 
and the entire lower part of the face, are seen repeated in thou- 
sands of working men's; or, as Irving chose to illustrate his 
position, " in thousands of Border horse-jockeys." In like 
manner, Wordsworth's face was, if not absolutely the indi- 
genous face of the Lake district, at any rate a variety of that 
face, a modification of that original type. The head was well 
filled out; and there, to begin with, was a great advantage over 
the head of Charles Lamb, which was absolutely truncated in 
the posterior region — sawn off, as it were, by no timid sawyer. 
The forehead was not remarkably lofty — and, by the way, some 
artists, in their ardour for realizing their phrenological precon- 
ceptions, not suffering nature to surrender quietly and by slow 
degrees, her own alphabet of signs, and characters, and hiero- 
glyphical expressions, but forcing her language prematurely 
into a conformity with their own crude speculations, have 
given to Sir Walter Scott a pile of forehead which is unpleasing 
and cataphysical, in fact, a caricature of anything that is ever 
seen in nature, and would (if real) be esteemed a deformity; in 
one instance, that which was introduced in some annual or 
other, the forehead makes about two-thirds of the entire face. 
Wordsworth's forehead is also liable to caricature misrepre- 
sentations, in these days of phrenology: but, whatever it may 
appear to be in any man's fanciful portrait, the real living fore- 
head, as I have been in the habit of seeing it for more than five- 
and-twenty years, is not remarkable for its height; but it is 
perhaps remarkable for its breadth and expansive development. 
Neither are the eyes of Wordsworth " large," as is erroneously 
stated somewhere in " Peter's Letters ; " on the contrary, they 
are (I think) rather small ; but that does not interfere with their 
effect, which at times is fine and suitable to his intellectual 
character. At times, I say, for the depth and subtlety of eyes 
varies exceedingly with the state of the stomach; and, if young 
ladies were aware of the magical transformations which can be 
wrought in the depth and sweetness of the eye by a few weeks' 
walking exercise, I fancy we should see their habits in this point 
altered greatly for the better. I have seen Wordsworth's eyes 
oftentimes affected powerfully in this respect; his eyes are not, 
under any circumstances, bright, lustrous, or piercing; but, 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 383 

after a long day's toil in walking, I have seen them assume an 
appearance the most solemn and spiritual that it is possible for 
the human eye to wear. The light which resides m them is at 
no time a superficial light; but, under favourable accidents it 
is a li^ht which seems to come from depths below all depths; 
in fact, it is more tfuly entitled to be held 'The light that never 
was on land or sea," a Ught radiating from some far spiritual 
world, than any the most idealizing light that ever yet a pamt- 
pr's hand created. The nose, a little arched, and large, which, 
by the way, (according to a natural phrenology, existing cen- 
turies ago amongst some of the lowest amongst the human 
species,) has always been accounted an unequivocal expression 
of animal appetites organically strong. And that was m fact 
the basis of Wordsworth's intellectual power: his intellectual 
passions were fervent and strong; because they rested upon a 
basis of animal sensibility superior to that of most men, dif- 
fused through all the animal passions (or appetites); and some- 
thing of that will be found to hold of all poets who have been 
great by original force and power, not (as Virgil) by means of 
fine management and exquisite artifice of composition applied 
to their conceptions. The mouth, and the region of the mouth, 
the whole circumjacencies of the mouth, were about the 
strongest feature in Wordsworth's face; there was nothing 
specially to be noticed that I know of, in the mere outline of 
the lips; but the swell and protrusion of the parts above and 
around the mouth, are both noticeable in themselves, and also 
because they remind me of a very interesting fact which I dis- 
covered about three years after this my first visit to 
Wordsworth. ^ 

Being a great collector of everything relating to Milton, i 
had naturally possessed myself, whilst yet very young of^ Rich- 
ardson the painter's thick octavo volume of notes on the Para- 
dise Lost." It happened, however, that my copy, in conse- 
quence of that mania for portrait collecting which has stripped 
so many English classics of their engraved portraits, had no 
picture of Milton. Subsequently I ascertained that it ought 
to have had a very good likeness of the great poet; and I never 
rested until I procured a copy of the book, which had not suf- 
fered in this respect by the fatal admiration of the amateur. 
The particular copy offered to me was one which had been 
priced unusually high, on account of the unusually fine speci- 
men which it contained of the engraved portrait. Ihis, for a 
particular reason, I was exceedingly anxious to see; and the 
reason was — that, according to an anecdote reported by 



384 DE QUINCEY 

Richardson himself, this portrait, of all that was shown to her, 
was the only one acknowledged by Milton's last surviving 
daughter, to be a strong likeness of her father. And her invol- 
untary gestures concurred with her deliberate words : — for, 
on seeing all the rest, she was silent and inanimate; but the 
very instant she beheld this from a crayon drawing which 
embellishes the work of Richardson, she burst out into a rap- 
ture of passionate recognition; exclaiming — "This is my 
father; this is my dear father! " Naturally, therefore, after such 
a testimony, so much stronger than any other person in the 
world could offer to the authentic value of this portrait, I was 
eager to see it. 

Judge of my astonishment, when, in this portrait of Milton, 
I saw a likeness nearly perfect of Wordsworth, better by much 
than any which I have since seen, of those expressly painted 
for himself. The likeness is tolerably preserved in that by 
Carruthers, in which one of the little Rydal waterfalls, etc., 
composes a background; yet this is much inferior, as a mere 
portrait of Wordsworth, to the Richardson head of Milton; 
and this, I believe, is the last which represents Wordsworth in 
the vigour of his power. The rest, which I have not seen, may 
be better as works of art, (for anything I know to the con- 
trary,) but they must labour under the great disadvantage of 
presenting the features when "defeatured" in the degree and the 
way I have described, by the idiosyncrasies of old age, as it 
affects this family; for it is noticed of the Wordsworths, by 
those who are familiar with their peculiarities, that, in their 
very blood and constitutional differences, lie hidden causes, 
able, in some mysterious way — 

" Those shocks of passion to prepare 
That kill the bloom before its time, 
And blanch, without the owner's crime, 
The most resplendent hair." 

Some people, it is notorious, live faster than others; the oil 
is burned out sooner in one constitution than another — and 
the cause of this may be various; but, in the Wordsworths, one 
part of the cause is, no doubt, the secret fire of a temperament 
too fervid; the self-consuming energies of the brain, that gnaw 
at the heart and life-strings forever. In that account which 
"The Excursion," presents to us of an imaginary Scotsman, 
who, to still the tumult of his heart, when visiting the " forces " 
(i. e. cataracts) of a mountainous region, obliges himself to study 
the laws of light and colour, as they affect the rainbow of the 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 385 

Stormy waters; vainly attempting to mitigate the fever which 
consumed him by entangHng his mind in profound specula- 
tions; raising a cross-fire of artillery from the subtilizing intel- 
lect, under the vain conceit that, in this way, he would silence 
the mighty battery of his impassioned brain — there we read 
a picture of Wordsworth and his own youth. In Miss Words- 
worth, every thoughtful observer might read the same self- 
consuming style of thought. And the effect upon each was so 
powerful for the promotion of a premature old age, and of a 
premature expression of old age, that strangers invariably sup- 
posed them fifteen to twenty years older than they were. And 
I remember Wordsworth once laughingly reporting to me, on 
returning from a short journey in 1809, a little personal anec- 
dote, which sufficiently showed what was the spontaneous 
impression upon that subject of casual strangers, whose feelings 
were not confused by previous knowledge of the truth. He 
was travelling by a stage-coach, and seated outside, amongst a 
good half dozen of fellow-passengers. One of these, an elderly 
man, who confessed to having passed the grand climacterical 
year (9 multiplied into 7) of 63, though he did not say precisely 
by how many years, said to Wordsworth, upon some anticipa- 
tions which they had been mutually discussing of changes likely 
to result from enclosures, etc., then going on or projecting — 
" Aye, aye, another dozen of years will show us strange sights ; 
but you and I can hardly expect to see them." "How so?" said 
W. "Why,my friend,howolddoyoutakemetobe?" "Oh,Ibeg 
pardon," said the other; "I meant no offence — but what?" look- 
ing at W. more attentively — " you'll never see threescore, I'm 
of opinion." And, to show that he was not singular in so think- 
ing, he appealed to all the other passengers; and the motion 
passed nem. con. that Wordsworth was rather over than under 
sixty. Upon this he told them the literal truth — that he had 
not yet accomplished his thirty-ninth year. " God bless me ! " 
said the climacterical man; "so then, after all, you'll have a 
chance to see your childer get up like, and get settled! God 
bless me, to think of that!" And so closed the conversation, 
leaving to W. a pointed expression, of his own premature age, 
as revealing itself by looks, in this unaffected astonishment, 
amongst a whole party of plain men, that he should really 
belong to a generation of the forward-looking, who live by 
hope; and might reasonably expect to see a child of seven 
years old matured into a man. 

Returning to the question of portraits, I would observe, that 
this Richardson engraving of Milton has the advantage of pre- 

25 



386 DE QUINCEY 

senting, not only by far the best likeness of Wordsworth, but 
of Wordsworth in the prime of his powers — a point so essen- 
tial in the case of one so liable to premature decay. It may be 
supposed that I took an early opportunity of carrying the book 
down to Grasmere, and calling for the opinions of Words- 
worth's family upon this most remarkable coincidence. Not 
one member of that family but was as much impressed as 
myself with the accuracy of the likeness. All the peculiarities 
even were retained — a drooping appearance of the eyelids, that 
remarkable swell which I have noticed about the mouth, the 
way in which the hair lay upon the forehead. In two points 
only there was a deviation from the rigourous truth of Words- 
worth's features — the face was a little too short and too broad 
and the eyes were too large. There was also a wreath of 
laurel about the head, which (as Wordsworth remarked) dis- 
turbed the natural expression of the whole picture; else, and 
with these few allowances, he also admitted that the resem- 
blance was, for that period of his life, (but let not that restriction 
be forgotten,) perfect, or as nearly so as art could accomplish. 
I have gone into so large and circumstantial a review of my 
recollections in a matter that would 'have been trifling and 
tedious in excess, had their recollection related to a less import- 
ant man; but, with a certain knowledge that the least of them 
will possess a lasting and a growing interest in connection with 
William Wordsworth — a man who is not simply destined to 
be had in everlasting remembrance by every generation of men, 
but (which is a modification of the kind worth any multiplica- 
tion of the degree) to be had in that sort of remembrance which 
has for its shrine the heart of man — that world of fear and 
grief, of love and trembling hope, which constitutes the essen- 
tial man ; in that sort of remembrance, and not in such a remem- 
brance as we grant to the ideas of a great philosopher, a great 
mathematician, or a great reformer. How different, how pecu- 
liar, is the interest which attends the great poets who have 
made themselves necessary to the human heart; who have first 
brought into consciousness, and next have clothed in words, 
those grand catholic feelings that belong to the grand catholic 
situations of Hfe, through all its stages; who have clothed them 
in such words that human wit despairs of bettering them ! How 
remote is that burning interest which settles upon men's living 
memories in our daily thoughts, from that which follows, in a 
disjointed and limping way, the mere nominal memories of 
those who have given a direction and movement to the currents 
of human thought, and who, by some leading impulse, have 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 387 

even quickened into life speculations appointed to terminate in 
positive revolutions of human power over physical agents! 
Mighty were the powers, solemn and serene is the memory, of 
Archimedes: and Appolonius shines like "the starry Galileo,'' in 
the firmament of human genius; yet how frosty is the feeling 
associated with these names by comparison with that which, 
upon every sunny brae, by the side of every ancient forest, even 
in the farthest depths of Canada, many a young innocent girl, 
perhaps at this very moment — looking now with fear to the 
dark recesses of the infinite forest, and now with love to the 
pages of the infinite poet, until the fear is absorbed and for- 
gotten in the love — cherishes in her heart for the name and 
person of Shakespeare! The one is abstraction, and a shadow 
recurring only by distinct efforts of recollection, and even thus 
to none but the enlightened and the learned; the other is a 
household image, rising amongst household remembrances, 
never separated from the spirit of delight, and hallowed by a 
human love! Such a place in the affections of the young and 
the ingenuous, no less than of the old and philosophic, who 
happen to have any depth of feeling, will Wordsworth occupy 
in every clime and in every land; for the language in which he 
writes, thanks be to Providence, which has beneficently opened 
the widest channels for the purest and most elevating literature, 
is now ineradicably planted in all quarters of the earth; the 
echoes under every latitude of every longitude now reverberate 
English words; and all things seem tending to this result — 
that the English and the Spanish languages will finally share 
the earth between them. Wordsworth is peculiarly the poet 
for the solitary and the meditative ; and, throughout the count- 
less myriads of future America and future Australia, no less 
than Polynesia and Southern Africa, there will be situations 
without end, fitted by their loneliness to favour his influence for 
centuries to come, by the end of which period it may be antici- 
pated that education (of a more enlightened quality and more 
systematic than yet prevails) may have wrought such changes 
on the human species, as will uphold the growth of all philoso- 
phy, and, therefore, of all poetry which has its foundations laid 
in the heart of man. 

Commensurate with the interest in the poetry will be a sec- 
ondary interest in the poet — in his personal appearance, and 
his habits of life, so far as they can be supposed at all dependent 
upon his intellectual characteristics; for, with respect to dif- 
ferences that are purely casual, and which illustrate no prin- 
ciple of higher origin than accidents of education or chance 



388 DE QUINCEY 

position, it is a gossiping taste only, that could seek for such 
information, and a gossiping taste that would choose to consult 
it. Meantime, it is under no such gossiping taste that volumes 
have been written upon the mere portraits and upon the pos- 
sible portraits of Shakespeare; and how invaluable should we 
all feel any record to be, which should raise the curtain upon 
Shakespeare's daily life — his habits, personal and social, his 
intellectual tastes, and his opinions on contemporary men, 
books, events, or national prospects! I cannot, therefore, 
think it necessary to apologize for the most circumstantial 
notices, past or to come, of Wordsworth's person and habits of 
life. But one thing it is highly necessary that I should explain, 
and the more so because a grand confession which I shall make 
at this point as in some measure necessary to protect myself 
from the appearance of a needless mystery and reserve, would, 
if unaccompanied by such an explanation, expose me to the 
suspicion of having, at times, yielded to a private prejudice, so 
far as to colour my account of Wordsworth with a spirit of 
pique or illiberality. I shall acknowledge, then, on my own 
part — and I feel that I might even make the same acknowl- 
edgment on the part of Professor Wilson — (though I have 
no authority for doing so) — that to neither of us, though, at 
all periods of our lives, treating him with the deep respect 
which is his due, and, in our earlier years, with a more than 
filial devotion — nay, with a blind loyalty of homage, which had 
in it, at that time, something of the spirit of martyrdom, which, 
for his sake, courted even reproach and contumely; yet to 
neither of us has Wordsworth made those returns of friend- 
ship and kindness which most firmly I maintain that we were 
entitled to have challenged. More by far in sorrow than in 
anger — sorrow that points to recollections too deep and too 
personal for a transient notice — I acknowledge myself to have 
been long alienated from Wordsworth; sometimes even I feel 
a rising emotion of hostility — nay, something, I fear, too 
nearly akin to vindictive hatred. Strange revolution of the 
human heart! strange example of the changes in human feeling 
that may be wrought by time and chance ! to find myself carried 
by the great tide of affairs, and by error, more or less, on one 
side or the other, either on Wordsworth's in doing too little, or 
on mine in expecting too much — carried so far away from 
that early position which, for so long a course of years, I held 
in respect to him — that now, for that fountain of love towards 
Mr. Wordsworth and all his household — fountain profound — 
fountain inexhaustible — 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 389 

" Whose only business was to flow — 
And flow it did, not taking heed 
Of its own bounty or their need "— 

now, I find myself standing- aloof, gloomily granting (because 
I cannot refuse) my intellectual homage, but no longer 
rendering my tribute as a willing service of the heart, or 
rejoicing in the prosperity of my idol! Could I have believed, 
twenty-five years ago, had a voice from Heaven revealed it, 
that, even then, with a view to what time should bring about, 
I might adopt the spirit of the old verses, and, apostrophizing 
Wordsworth, might say — Great Poet! when that day, so fer- 
vently desired, shall come, that men shall undo their wrongs, 
and when every tongue shall chant thy praises, and every heart 

" Devote a wreath to thee — 
That day (for come it will) that day 
Shall I lament to see." 

But no; not so. Lament I never did; nor suffered even 
" the hectic of a moment " to sully or to trouble that purity of 
perfect pleasure with which I welcomed this great revolution 
in the public feeling. Let me render justice to Professor Wil- 
son, as well as to myself: not for a moment, not by a soli- 
tary movement of reluctance or demur, did either of us 
hang back in giving that public acclamation which we, by so 
many years, had anticipated ; yes, we singly — we with no sym- 
pathy to support us from any quarter. The public press 
remains, with its inexorable records, to vouch for us, that we 
paid an oriental homage — homage as to one who could have 
pleaded antique privilege, and the consecration of centuries, at 
a time when the finger of scorn was pointed at Mr. Wordsworth 
from every journal in the land; and that we persisted in this 
homage at a period long enough removed to have revolution- 
ized the public mind, and also long enough to have undermined 
the personal relations between us of confidential friendship. 
Did it ask no courage to come forward, in the first character, 
as solitary friends, holding up our protesting hands amidst a 
wilderness of chattering buffoons? Did it ask no magnanimity 
to stand firmly to the post we had assumed, not passively acqui- 
escing in the new state of public opinion, but exulting in it 
and aiding it, long after we had found reason to think ourselves 
injuriously treated? Times are changed; it needs no courage, 
in the year of our Lord 1839, to discover and Proclaim a great 
poet in William Wordsworth; it needed none in the year 181 5, 
to discover a frail power in the French empire, or an idol of 



390 DE QUINCEY 

clay and brass in the French Emperor. But, to make the first 
discovery in the years 1801, 1802, the other in 1808, those 
things were worthy of honour; and the first was worthy of 
gratitude from all the parties interested in the event. Let me 
not, however, be misunderstood — Mr. Wordsworth is a man 
of unimpeached, unimpeachable integrity; he neither has done, 
nor could have done, consciously, any act in violation of his 
conscience. On the contrary, I am satisfied. Professor Wilson 
is satisfied, that injuries of a kind to involve an admitted viola- 
tion of principle, cannot have occurred in Mr. Wordsworth's 
intercourse with any man. But there are cases of wrong for 
which the conscience is not the competent tribunal. Sensi- 
bility to the just claims of another, power to appreciate these 
claims, power also to perceive the true mode of conveying and 
expressing the appreciation — in a case, suppose, where the 
claims to consideration are at once real, and even tangible, as 
to their ground, yet subtle and aerial as to the shape they have 
assumed — claims, for instance, founded on a personal devo- 
tion to the interests of the other party, when the rest of the 
world slighted them — this mode of appreciating skill may be 
utterly wanting, or may be crossed and thwarted by many a 
conflicting bias, where the conscience is quite incapable of 
going astray. I imagine a case such as this which follows : — 
The case of a man who, for many years, has connected himself 
closely with the domestic griefs and joys of another, over and 
above his primary service of giving to him the strength and the 
encouragement of a profound literary sympathy, at a time of 
universal scowling from the world; suppose this man to fall 
into a situation in which, from want of natural connections and 
from his state of insulation in life, it might be most important 
to his feelings that some support should be lent to him by a 
family having a known place and acceptation, and what may 
be called a root in the country, by means of connections, 
descent, and long settlement. To look for this, might be a 
most humble demand on the part of one who had testified his 

devotion in the way supposed. To miss it might but 

enough. I murmur not; complaint is weak at all times; and 
the hour is passed irrevocably, and by many a year, in which an 
act of friendship so natural, and costing so little, (in both senses 
so priceless,) could have been availing. The ear is deaf that 
should have been solaced by the sound of welcome. Call, but 
you will not be heard ; shout aloud, but your " ave ! " and " all 
hail ! " will now tell only as an echo of departed days, proclaim- 
ing the hollowness of human hopes. I, for my part, have long 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 391 

learned the lesson of suffering in silence; and also I have 
learned to know that, wheresoever female prejudices are con- 
cerned, there it will be a trial more than Herculean, of a man's^ 
wisdom, if he can walk with an even step, and swerve neither 
to the right nor the left. 

I shall now proceed to sketch the daily life and habits of 
those who are familiarly known to the public as the Lake 
Poets; but, first of all, as a proper introduction to this sketch, 
I shall trace, in a brief outHne, the chief incidents in the life of 
William Wordsworth, which are interesting, not only in virtue 
of their illustrious subject, but also as exhibiting a most 
remarkable (almost a providential) arrangement of circum- 
stances, all tending to one result — that of insulating from 
worldly cares, and carrying onward from childhood to the 
grave, in a state of serene happiness, one who was unfitted for 
daily toil, and, at all events, who could not, under such demands 
upon his time and anxieties, have prosecuted those genial 
labours in which all mankind have an interest. 

Notes 

* At the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where the town is 
viewed as a mere ministerial appendage to the numerous colleges — 
the civic Oxford, for instance,, existing for the sake of the academic 
Oxford, and not vice versa — it has naturally happened that the 
students honour with the name of " a man," him only who wears a cap 
and gown. The word is not used with any reference to physical 
powers, or to age; but simply to the final object for which the places 
are supposed to have first arisen, and to maintain themselves. There 
is, however, a ludicrous effect produced, in some instances, by the 
use of this term in contradistinguishing parties. " Was he a man? " 
is a frequent question; and as frequent in the mouth of a stripling 
under nineteen, speaking, perhaps, of a huge, elderly tradesman — 
" Oh, no! not a man at all." 

* See the divine passage in " The Excursion," beginning 

"Ah! what a lesson for a thoughtless man, 
If any gladsome field of earth." 

'All which inimitable graces of nature have, by the hands of 
mechanic art, by solid masonry, by whitewashing, etc., been extermi- 
nated as a growth of weeds and nuisances for thirty good years. — 
August 17, 1853. 

^That most accomplished, and to Coleridge most pious daughter, 
whose recent death afflicted so very many who knew her only by 
her writings. She had married her cousin, Mr. Sergeant Coleridge, 
and in that way retained her illustrious maiden name as a wife. At 
seventeen, when last I saw her, she was the most perfect of all pen- 
sive, nun-like, intellectual beauties that I have seen in real breathing 
life. The upper parts of her face were verily divine. See, for an 
artist's opinion, the life of that admirable man Collins, by his son. 



392 DE QUINCEY 

^ " Once for all " I say — on recollecting that Coleridge's verses to 
Sara were made transferable to any Sara who reigned at the time. 
At least three Saras appropriated them; all three long since in the 
grave. 

" In our Westmoreland highroads, which are so fortunate as to 
have little breadth beyond that of lanes, there is no side-path, not 
even on approaching towns; consequently everybody walks at large 
upon the carriage track. 



n 

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH was born at Cocker- 
mouth, a small town of Cumberland, seated on the 
river Cocker. His father was a lawyer, and acted as 
an agent for that Lord Lonsdale, who is not unfre- 
quently described by those who still remember him, as " the 
bad Lord Lonsdale." In what was he bad? Chiefly, I beheve, 
in this — that, being a man of great local power, founded on his 
rank, on his official station of Lord Lieutenant over two coun- 
ties, and on a verv large estate, he used his power m a most 
oppressive way. I have heard it said that he was mad; and, 
at any rate, he was inordinately capricious — capricious even 
to eccentricity. But perhaps his madness was nothing more 
than the intemperance of a haughty and a headstrong will, 
encouraged by the consciousness of power, and tempted to 
abuses of it by the abject servility which poverty and depend- 
ence presented in one direction, embittering the contrast of that 
defiance which inevitably faced him in another throughout a 
land of freedom, and amongst spirits as haughty as his own. 
He was a true feudal chieftain; and, in the very approaches to 
his mansion, in the style of his equipage, or whatever else was 
likely to meet the public eye, he delighted to express his dis- 
dain of modern refinements, and the haughty carelessness of 
his magnificence. The coach in which he used to visit Fenrith 
the nearest town to his principal house of Lowther, was oia 
and neglected: his horses fine, but untrimmed; and such was 
the impression diffused about him by his gloomy temper and 
his habits of oppression, that the streets were silent as he trav- 
ersed them, and an awe sat upon many faces, (so at least, i 
have heard a Penrith contemporary of the old fespot declare,; 
pretty much like that which may be supposed to attend the 
entry into a guilty town, of some royal commission for trying 
state criminals. In his park, you saw some of the most mag- 
nificent timber in the kingdom — trees that were coeval with 
the feuds of York and Lancaster, yews that perhaps had fur- 
nished bows to Coeur de Lion, and oaks that might have built 
a navy. All was savage grandeur about these native forests: 

393 



394 '^^ QUINCEY 

their sweeping lawns and glades had been unapproached, for 
centuries it might be, by the hand of art; and amongst them 
roamed — not the timid fallow deer — but thundering droves 
of wild horses. 

Lord Lonsdale, according to an old English writer, (in 
describing, I think, the Earl of Arundel,) " went sometimes to 
London, because there only he found a greater man than him- 
self; but not often, because at home he was allowed to forget 
that there was such a man." Even in London, however, his 
haughty injustice found occasions for making itself known. 
On a court day, (I revive an anecdote once familiarly known,) 
St. James's Street was lined by cavalry, and the orders were 
peremptory, that no carriages should be allowed to pass, 
except those which were carrying parties to court. Whether 
it were by accident or no. Lord Lonsdale's carriage advanced, 
and the coachman, in obedience to orders shouted out from the 
window, was turning down the forbidden route, when a trooper 
rode up to the horses' heads, and stopped them ; the thundering 
menaces of Lord Lonsdale perplexed the soldier, who did not 
know but he might be bringing himself into a scrape by per- 
sisting in his opposition; but the officer on duty, observing the 
scene, rode up, and, in a determined tone, enforced the order, 
causing two of his men to turn the horses' heads round into 
Piccadilly. Lord Lonsdale threw his card to the officer — and 
a duel followed; in which, however, the outrageous injustice 
of his Lordship met with a pointed rebuke ; for the first person 
whom he summoned to his aid, in the quality of a second, 
though a friend, and (I believe) a relative of his own, declined 
to sanction, by any interference, so scandalous a quarrel with 
an officer for simply executing an official duty. In this 
dilemma — for probably he was aware that few military men 
would fail to take the same disapproving view of the affair — 
he applied to the present^ Earl of Lonsdale, then Sir William 
Lowther. Either there must have been some needless dis- 
courtesy in the officer's mode of fulfilling his duty, or else Sir 
William thought the necessity of the case, however wantonly 
provoked, a sufficient justification for a relative giving his 
assistance, even under circumstances of such egregious injus- 
tice. At any rate, it is due to Sir William, in mere candour, to 
suppose that he did nothing in this instance but what his con- 
science approved; seeing, that in all others his conduct has 
been such as to win him that universal respect of the two 
counties in which he is best known. He it was that acted as 
second; and, by a will which is said to have been dated the 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 395 

same day, he became eventually possessed of a large property, 
which did not necessarily accompany the title. 

Another anecdote is told of the same Lord Lonsdale, which 
expresses, in- a more eccentric way, and a way that to many 
people will be affecting — to some shocking — the moody 
energy of his passions. He loved, with passionate fervour, a 
fine young woman, of humble parentage, in a Cumberland 
farm-house. Her he had persuaded to leave her father and put 
herself under his protection. Whilst yet young and beautiful, 
she died: Lord Lonsdale's sorrow was profound; he could not 
bear the thought of a final parting from that face which had 
become so familiar to his heart; he caused her to be embalmed; 
a glass was placed over her features ; and, at intervals, when his 
thoughts reverted to her memory, he found a consolation (or 
perhaps a luxurious irritation) of his sorrow, in visiting this sad 
memorial of his former happiness. This story, which I have 
often heard repeated by the country people of Cumberland, 
strengthened the general feeling of this eccentric nobleman's 
self-willed character, though in this instance complicated with 
a trait of character, that argued nobler capacities. By what 
rules he guided himself in dealing with the various lawyers, 
agents, or stewards, whom his extensive estates brought into a 
dependency upon his justice or his moderation — whether in 
fact he had no rule, but left all to accident or caprice — I have 
never learned. Generally, I have heard it said, that in some 
years of his life he resisted the payment of all bills indiscrimi- 
nately, which he had any colourable plea for supposing to con- 
tain overcharges ; some fared ill because they were neighbours; 
and his Lordship could say, that ''he knew them to be knaves;" 
others fared worse, because they were so remote that " how 
could his Lordship know what they were?" Of this number, 
and possibly for this reason left unpaid, was Wordsworth's 
father. He died whilst his four sons and one daughter were 
yet helpless children, leaving to them respectable fortunes; but 
which, as yet, were unrealized and tolerably hypothetic, as they 
happened to depend upon so shadowy a basis as the justice of 
Lord Lonsdale. The executors of the will, and trustees of the 
children's interests, in one point acted wisely: foreseeing the 
result of a legal contest with so potent a defendant as this 
leviathan of two counties, and that, under any nominal award, 
the whole estate of the orphans must be swallowed up in the 
costs of a suit that would be carried into Chancery, and finally 
before the Lords, they prudently withdrew from all active 
measures of opposition, confiding the event to Lord Lonsdale's 



396 DE QUINCEY 

returning sense of justice. Unfortunately for that nobleman's 
reputation, and also, as was thought, for the children's pros- 
perity, before this somewhat rusty quality of justice could have 
time to operate, his Lordship died. 

However, for once the world was wrong in its anticipations 
for the children: the successor to Lord Lonsdale's titles and 
Cumberland estates was made aware of the entire case, in all 
its circumstances; and he very honourably gave directions for 
full restitution being made. This was done; and in one respect 
the result was more fortunate for the children than if they had 
been trained from youth to rely upon their expectations: for 
by the time this repayment was made, three out of the five chil- 
dren were already settled in life, with the very amplest prospects 
opening before them — so ample as to make their private patri- 
monial fortunes of inconsiderable importance in their eyes: and 
very probably the withholding of their inheritance it was, how- 
ever unjust, and however little contemplated as an occasion of 
any such effect, that urged these three persons to the exertions 
requisite for their present success. Two only of the children 
remained to whom the restoration of their patrimony was a mat- 
ter of grave importance; but it was precisely those two whom no 
circumstances could have made independent of their hereditary 
means by personal exertions — viz. William Wordsworth, the 
poet, and Dorothy, the sole daughter of the house. The three 
others were — Richard, the eldest, he had become a thriving 
solicitor at one of the inns of court in London; and, if he died 
only moderately rich, and much below the expectations of his 
acquaintance, in the final result of his labourious life, it was 
because he was moderate in his desires; and, in his later years, 
reverting to the pastoral region of his infancy and boyhood, 
chose rather to sit down by a hearth of his own amongst the 
Cumberland mountains, and wisely to woo the deities of domes- 
tic pleasures and health, than to follow the chase after wealth 
in the feverish crowds of the capital. The third son, I 
believe was Christopher, (Dr. Wordsworth,) who, at an early 
age, became a man of importance in the English church, being 
made one of the chaplains and librarians of the Archbishop of 
Canterbury, (Dr. Manners Sutton, father of the late Speaker). 
He has since risen to the important and dignified station — 
once held by Barrow, and afterwards by Bentley — of Master 
of Trinity in Cambridge. Trinity in Oxford is not a first-rate 
college: but Trinity, Cambridge, answers in rank and authority 
to Christ Church in Oxford ; and to be the head of that college 
is rightly considered on a level with a bishopric. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 397 

Dr Wordsworth has distinguished hitnself as ati author by 
several very useful republications, (especially the Ecdesiast^ 
carBio-raphy,") which he has enriched with valuable notes. 
And in his own person, besides other works more excluswely 
Earned he is the author of one very interesting work of histori- 
cir research upon the long agitated question of ' Who wro e 
the 'Eicon Basilike?'" a question still unsettled, but much nearer 
to a eulement in consequence of the strong P-su-P 'ons 
which Dr Wordsworth has adduced on behalf of the Kmgs 
daim ' The fourth and youngest son, John, was in the service 
of the East India Company, and perished most ""happily on the 
vovaee which he had meant to be his last, off the coast ot 
DorsetshTre in the Company's ship Abergavenny. A calumny 
was current at the time, that Captain Wordsworth was in a 
state of intoxication at the time of the calamity. But the 
printed report of the aflfair, revised by survivors entirely dis- 
oroves the calumny; which, besides, was in itself incredible to 
aU who were acquainted with Captain Wordsworth s most tem- 
perlte and even philosophic habits of life. So Peculiarly mdeed 
was Captain Wordsworth's temperament and demeanour, 
Tnd the whole system of his life, coloured by a grave and medi- 
cative turn of thought, that, amongst his brother officers in the 
Honourable Company's service, he bore the sirname of The 
Philosopher." And William Wordsworth, the poet, not on y 
spoke of him always with a sort of respect, that argued him to 
have been no ordinary man, but he has frequently assured me 
oHne fact which, as implying some want of frankness and 
sincerity gave me pain to hear — viz. that m the fine hues 
entitled "The Happy Warrior," in which an analytical account 
's even of the m=dn elements which enter into the composition 
of I real hero, he had in view chiefly his brother John s charac- 
ter Tliat was true, I dare say, but it was inconsisten tin some 
r^easure, with the note attached to the lines by which the reader 
karns that it was out of reverence for Lord Ndson, as one who 
transcended the estimate here made, that the poem had no 
beTn openly connected with his name, as the real sugges er of 
the thoughts. Now, privatdy, though still professing a lively 
admiratifn for the mighty Admiral, as one of the few men vyho 
cS into his professional labours a real and v.vid genius 
(and thus far Wordsworth often testified a deep admiration for 
Lord Ndson) yet, in reference to these particu ar Imes, he 
un° ormly dec a^d that Lord Ndson was much below the ideal 
there contemplated, and that, in fact, it had been suggested by 
the recollection of his brother. But, surely, m some of the 



398 DE QUINCEY 

first passages, this cannot be so; for example, when he makes 
it one trait of the heaven-born hero, that he, if called upon to 
face some mighty day of battle 

" To which heaven has join'd 
Great issues, good or bad, for human kind — 
Is happy as a lover, and attired 
With a supernal brightness like a man inspir'd " 

surely he must have had Lord Nelson's idea predominating in 
his thoughts; for Captain Wordsworth was scarcely tried in 
such a situation. There can be no doubt, however, that he 
merited the praises of his brother; and it was indeed an improb- 
able tale, that he should first of all deviate from this philosophic 
temperance upon an occasion when all his energies, and the 
fullest self-possession were all likely to prove little enough. In 
reality it was the pilot, the incompetent pilot, who caused the 
fatal catastrophe : — '* O pilot, you have ruined me ! " were 
amongst the last words Captain Wordsworth was heard to 
utter — pathetic words, and fit for him, " a meek man and a 
brave," to use in addressing a last reproach, and summing up 
the infinite injury, to one who, not through misfortune or over- 
ruling will of Providence, but through miserable conceit and 
unprincipled levity, had brought total ruin upon so many a 
gallant countryman. Captain Wordsworth might have saved 
his own life; but the perfect loyalty of his nature to the claims 
upon him, that sublime fidelity to duty which is so often found 
amongst men of his profession, kept him to the last upon the 
wreck; and, after that, it is probable that the almost total wreck 
of his own fortunes, (which, but for this overthrow, would have 
amounted to twenty thousand pounds, upon the successful ter- 
mination of this one voyage,) but still more, the total ruin of the 
new and splendid Indiaman confided to his care, had so much 
dejected his spirits, that he was not in a condition for making 
the efforts that, under a more hopeful prospect, he might have 
been able to make. Six weeks his body lay unrecovered; at 
the end of that time it was found, and carried to the Isle of 
Wight, and buried in close neighbourhood to the quiet fields 
which he had so recently described, in letters to his family at 
Grasmere, as a Paradise of English peace, to which his mind 
would be likely oftentimes to revert, amidst the agitations of 
the sea. 

Such were the modes of^ life pursued by three of the orphan 
children — such the termination of life to two. Meantime, the 
daughter of the house was reared liberally, in the family of a 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 399 

relation at Windsor; and she might have pursued a quiet and 
decorous career, of a character, perhaps, somewhat tame, under 
the same dignified auspices; but at an early period of life her 
good angel thfew open to her a life of nobler prospects, in the 
opportunity which then arose, and which she did not hesitate 
to seize, of becoming the companion, through a life of delight- 
ful wanderings — of what, to her more elevated friends, seemed 
nothing short of vagrancy — the companion and the confiden- 
tial friend, and, with a view to the enlargement of her own intel- 
lect, the pupil of a brother, the most original and most medita- 
tive man of his own age. William had passed his infancy on 
the very margin of the Lake District, just six miles, in fact, 
beyond the rocky screen of Whinlatter, and within one hour's 
ride of Bassinthwaite Water. To those who live in the tame 
scenery of Cockermouth, the blue mountains in the distance, 
the sublime peaks of Borrowdale and of Buttermere, raise aloft 
a signal, as it were, of a new country, a country of romance and 
mystery, to which the thoughts are habitually turning. Chil- 
dren are fascinated and haunted with vague temptations, when 
standing on the frontiers of such a foreign land; and so was 
Wordsworth fascinated, so haunted. Fortunate for Words- 
worth that, at an early age, he was transferred to the very 
centre of this lovely district. 'At the little town of Hawkshead, 
seated on the north-west angle of Esthwaite Water, a grammar 
school (which, in English usage, means a school for classical 
literature) was founded, in Queen Elizabeth's reign, by Arch- 
bishop Sandys, a member of a very ancient family of that name, 
still seated in the neighbourhood. Hither were sent all the four 
brothers ; and here it was that Wordsworth passed his life until 
the time arrived for his removal to college. Taking into con- 
sideration the peculiar tastes of the person, and the peculiar 
advantages of the place, I conceive that no pupil of a public 
school can ever have passed a more luxurious boyhood than 
Wordsworth. The school discipHne was not, I believe, very 
strict; the mode of living out of school very much resembled 
that of Eton for Oppidans; less elegant perhaps, and less costly 
in its provisions for accommodation, but not less comfortable; 
and in that part of the arrangements which was chiefly Etonian, 
even more so; for in both places the boys, instead of being 
gathered into one fold, and at night into one or two huge 
dormitories, were distributed amongst motherly old " dames," 
technically so called at Eton, but not at Hawkshead. In the 
latter place, agreeably to the inferior scale of the whole estab- 
lishment, the houses were smaller, and more cottage-like, con- 



400 DE QUINCEY 

sequently more like private households; and the old lady of 
the menage was more constantly amongst them, providing, 
with maternal tenderness and with a professional pride, for the 
comfort of her young flock, and protecting the weak from 
oppression. The humble cares to which these poor matrons 
dedicated themselves, may be collected from several allusions 
scattered through the poems of Wordsworth; that entitled 
"Nutting," for instance, in which his own early Spinosistic feel- 
ing is introduced, of a mysterious presence diffused through the 
solitudes of woods, a presence that was disturbed by the intru- 
sion of careless and noisy outrage, and which is brought into a 
strong relief by the previous homely picture of the old house- 
wife equipping her young charge with beggars' weeds in order 
to prepare him for a struggle with thorns and brambles. 
Indeed, not only the moderate rank of the boys, and the pecu- 
liar kind of relation assumed by these matrons, equally sug- 
gested this humble class of motherly attentions, but the whole 
spirit of the place and neighbourhood was favourable to an old 
English homeliness of domestic and personal economy. 
Hawkshead, most fortunately for its own manners and the 
primitive style of its habits even to this day, stands about six 
miles out of the fashionable line for the " Lakers." 

Esthwaite, though a lovely scene in its summer garniture of 
woods, has no features of permanent grandeur to rely upon. 
A wet or gloomy day, even in summer, reduces it to little more 
than a wildishpond, surrounded by miniature hills: and the sole 
circumstances which restore the sense of a romantic region and 
an alpine character, are the knowledge (but not the sense) of 
endless sylvan avenues, stretching for twenty miles to the sea- 
side, and the towering groups of Langdale and Grasmere fells, 
which look over the little pastoral barriers of Esthwaite from 
distances of eight, ten, and fourteen miles. Esthwaite, there- 
fore, being no object for itself, and the subHme head of Conis- 
ton being accessible by a road which evades Hawkshead, few 
tourists ever trouble the repose of this little village town. And 
in the days of which I am speaking, (1778- 1787,) tourists were 
as yet few and infrequent to any parts of the country. Mrs. 
Radcliffe had not begun to cultivate the sense of the pictur- 
esque in her popular romances; guide-books with the sole 
exception of " Gray's Posthumous Letters," had not arisen to 
direct public attention to this domestic Calabria; roads were 
rude, and, in many instances, not wide enough to admit post- 
chaises; but, above all, the whole system of travelling accom- 
modations was barbarous and antediluvian for the requisitions 



WII.LIAM WORDSWORTH 4OI 

of the pampered south. As yet the land had rest; the annual 
fever did not shake the very hills ; and (which was the happiest 
immunity of the whole) false taste, the pseudo-romantic rage, 
had not violated the most awful solitudes amongst the ancient 
hills by opera-house decorations. Wordsworth, therefore, 
enjoyed this labyrinth of valleys in a perfection that no one 
can have experienced since the opening of the present century. 
The whole was one paradise of virgin beauty; and even the 
rare works of man, all over the land, were hoar with the gray 
tints of an antique picturesque; nothing was new, nothing was 
raw and uncicatrized. Hawkshead, in particular, though 
tamely seated in itself and its immediate purlieus, has a most 
fortunate and central locality, as regards the best (at least the 
most interesting) scenes for a pedestrian rambler. The gorge- 
ous scenery of Borrowdale, the austere sublimities of Wast- 
dalehead, of Langdalehead, or Mardale; these are too oppres- 
sive, in their collossal proportions and their utter solitudes, for 
encouraging a perfectly human interest. Now, taking Hawks- 
head as a centre, with a radius of about eight miles, one might 
describe a little circular tract which embosoms a perfect net- 
work of little valleys — separate wards or cells, as it were, of 
one large valley, walled in by the great primary mountains of 
the region. Grasmere, Easdale, Little Langdale, Tilberthwaite, 
Yewdale, Elter Water, Loughrigg Tarn, Skelwith, and many 
other little quiet nooks, lie within a single division of this laby- 
rinthine district. All these are within one summer afternoon's 
ramble. And amongst these, for the years of his boyhood, lay 
the daily excursions of Wordsworth. 

I do not conceive that Wordsworth could have been an 
amiable boy; he was austere and unsocial, I have reason to 
think, in his habits; not generous; and, above all, not self- 
denying. Throughout his later life, with all the benefits of a 
French discipHne in the lesser charities of social intercourse, 
he has always exhibited a marked impatience of those particular 
courtesies of life. Not but he was kind and obliging where 
his services would cost him no exertion; but I am pretty certain 
that no consideration would ever have induced Wordsworth to 
burthen himself with a lady's reticule, parasol, shawl, "or any- 
thing that was hers." Mighty must be the danger which would 
induce him to lead her horse by the bridle. Nor would he, 
without some demur, stop to offer her his hand over a stile. 
Freedom — unlimited, careless, insolent freedom — unoccupied 
possession of his own arms — absolute control over his own 
legs and motions — these have always been so essential to his 
26 



402 DE QUINCEY 

comfort, that in any case where they were likely to become 
questionable, he would have declined to make one of the party. 
Meantime, we are not to suppose that Wordsworth, the boy, 
expressly sought for solitary scenes of nature amongst woods 
and mountains, with a direct conscious anticipation of imagi- 
native pleasure, and loving them with a pure disinterested love, 
on their own separate account. These are feelings beyond 
boyish nature, or, at all events, beyond boyish nature trained 
amidst the necessities of social intercourse. Wordsworth, like 
his companions, haunted the hills and the vales for the sake of 
angHng, snaring birds, swimming, and sometimes of hunting, 
according to the Westmoreland fashion, on foot; for riding to 
the chase is quite impossible, from the precipitous nature of 
the ground. It was in the course of these pursuits, by an indi- 
rect effect growing gradually upon him, that Wordsworth 
became a passionate lover of nature, at the time when the 
growth of his intellectual faculties made it possible that he 
should combine those thoughtful passions with the experience 
of the eye and the ear. 

There is, amongst the poems of Wordsworth, one most 
ludicrously misconstrued by his critics, which offers a philo- 
sophical hint upon this subject of great instruction. I will 
preface it with the little incident which first led Wordsworth 
into a commentary upon his own meaning. One night, as 
often enough happened, during the Peninsular war, he and I 
had walked up Dunmail Raise, from Grasmere, about mid- 
night, in order to meet the carrier who brought the London 
newspapers, by a circuitous course from Keswick. The case 
was this: Coleridge, for many years, received a copy of the 
"Courier," as a mark of esteem, and in acknowledgment of his 
many contributions to it, from one of the proprietors, Mr. 
Daniel Stewart. This went up in any case, let Coleridge be 
where he might, to Mrs. Coleridge; for a single day, it staid at 
Keswick, for the use of Southey; and, on the next, it came on 
to Wordsworth, by the slow conveyance of a carrier, plying 
with a long train of cars between Whitehaven and Kendal. 
Many a time the force of the storms or floods would compel the 
carrier to stop on his route, five miles short of Grasmere, at 
Wythburn, or even eight miles short, at Legberthwaite. But, 
as there was always hope until one or two o'clock in the morn- 
ing, often and often it would happen that, in the deadly impa- 
tience for earlier intelligence, Wordsworth and I would walk 
off to meet him about midnight, to a distance of three or four 
miles. Upon one of these occasions, when some great crisis 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 403 

in Spain was daily apprehended, we had waited for an hour or 
more, sitting upon one of the many huge blocks of stone which 
lie scattered over that narrow field of battle on the desolate 
frontier of Curhberland and Westmoreland, where King Dun 
Mail, with all his peerage, fell, more than a thousand years ago. 
The time had arrived, at length, that all hope for that night had 
left us; no sound came up through the winding valleys that 
stretched to the north; and the few cottage lights, gleaming, at 
wide distances, from recesses amidst the rocky hills, had long 
been extinct. At intervals, Wordsworth had stretched himself 
at length on the high road, applying his ear to the ground, 
so as to catch any sound of wheels that might be groaning 
along at a distance. Once, when he was slowly rising from 
this effort, his eye caught a bright star that was glittering 
between the brow of Seat Sandal, and of the mighty Helvellyn. 
He gazed upon it for a minute or so; and then, upon turning 
away to descend into Grasmere, he made the following explana- 
tion: — " I have remarked, from my earliest days, that if, under 
any circumstances, the attention is energetically braced up to 
an act of steady observation, or of steady expectation, then, 
if this intense condition of vigilance should suddenly relax, 
at that moment any beautiful, any impressive visual object, 
or collection of objects, falling upon the eye, is carried to 
the heart with a power not known under other circumstances. 
Just now, my ear was placed upon the stretch, in order to 
catch any sound of wheels that might come down upon the 
Lake of Wythburn from the Keswick road : at the very instant 
when I raised my head from the ground, in final abandon- 
ment of hope for this night, at the very instant when the 
organs of attention were all at once relaxing from their ten- 
sion, the bright star hanging in the air above those outlines 
of massy blackness, fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated 
my capacity of apprehension with a pathos and a sense of 
the Infinite, that would not have arrested me under other 
circumstances." He then went on to illustrate the same psy- 
chological principle from another instance; it was an instance 
derived from that exquisite poem, in which he describes a 
mountain boy planting himself at twilight on the margin of 
some solitary bay of Windermere, and provoking the owls 
to a contest with himself, by " mimic hooting," blown through 
his hands; which of itself becomes an impressive scene to 
any one able to realize to his fancy the various elements of 
the solitary woods and waters, the solemn vesper hour, the 
solitary bird, the solitary boy. Afterwards, the poem goes 



404 DE QUINCEY 

on to describe the boy as waiting, amidst "the pauses of his 
skill," for the answers of the birds — waiting with intensity 
of expectation — and then, at length, when, after waiting to 
no purpose, his attention began to relax — that is, in other 
words, under the giving way of one exclusive direction of his 
senses, began suddenly to allow an admission to other objects 
— then, in that instant, the scene actually before him, the 
visible scene, would enter unawares 

" With all its solemn imagery " — 

This complex scenery was — What? 

** Was carried far into his heart, 
With all its pomp, and that uncertain heav'n received 
Into the bosom of the steady lake." 

This very expression, " far," by which space and its infinities 
are attributed to the human heart, and to its capacities of 
reechoing the sublimities of nature, has always struck me as 
with a flash of subhme revelation. On this, however, Words- 
worth did not say anything in his commentary; nor did he 
notice the conclusion, which is this. After describing the 
efforts of the boy, and next the passive state which succeeded, 
under his disappointment, (in which condition it was that the 
solemn spectacle entered the boy's mind with effectual power, 
and with a semi-conscious sense of its beauty that would not 
be denied,) the poet goes on to say 

" And I suppose that I have stood 
A full half hour beside his quiet grave, 
Mute — for he died when he was ten years old." 

Wherefore, then, did the poet stand in the village church- 
yard of Hawkshead, wrapt in a trance of reverie, over the grave 
of this particular boy? "It was," says Lord Jeffrey, "for that 
single accomplishment " — viz. the accomplishment of mimick- 
ing the Windermere owls so well that not men only — Coler- 
idge, for instance, or Professor Wilson, or other connoisseurs 
of owl-music — might have been hoaxed, but actually the old 
birds themselves, grave as they seem, were effectually hum- 
bugged into entering upon a sentimental correspondence of 
love or friendship — almost regularly " duplying," " replying," 
and "quadruplying," (as Scotch law has it,) to the boy's original 
theme. But here, in this solution of Lord Jeffrey's, there is, 
at all events, a dismal oversight; for it is evident to the most 
careless reader that the very object of the poem is not the 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 



405 



first or initial stage of the boy^s history — the exercise of skill 
which led him, as an occasion, into a rigid and tense effort of 
attention — not this, but the second stage, the consequence 
of that attention. Even the attention was an effect, a deriva- 
tive state; but the second stage, upon which the poet fixes his 
object, is an effect of that effect; and it is clear that the original 
notice of the boy's talent is introduced only as a conditio sine 
qua non — a notice without which a particular result (namely, 
the tense attention of expectation) could not have been made 
intelligible; as, again, without this result being noticed, the 
reaction of that action could quite as little have been made 
intelligible. Else, and but for this conditional and derivative 
necessity, but for this dependency of the essential circum- 
stance upon the boy's power of mimicry, it is evident that the 
" accomplishment " — which Lord Jeffrey so strangely supposes 
to have been the main object of the poet in recording the boy, 
and the main subject of his reverie by the side of his grave — 
never would have been noticed. It is difficult, indeed, to con- 
ceive a stronger evidence of that incoherency of thought under 
which Lord Jeffrey must have allowed himself to read Words- 
worth, than this very blunder. 

But, leaving his Lordship, what was the subject of the poet's 
reverie? some reader may say. A poem ought to explain 
itself; and we cannot for a moment admit, as a justifying sub- 
ject for reverie, any private knowledge which the poet might 
happen to have of the boy's character, or of the expectations 
he had chanced to raise amongst his friends. I will endeavour 
to say a word on this question ; but, that I may not too much 
interrupt the narration, in a note. At the same time, let me 
remind the reader of one great and undeniable truth: it is a 
fact which cannot be controverted, except by the very thought- 
less and the very unobserving, that scarcely one in a thousand 
of impassioned cases, scarcely one effect in a thousand of all 
the memorable effects produced by poets, can, upon any 
theories, yet received amongst us, be even imperfectly 
explained. And, especially, is this true of original poetry. 
The cases are past numbering in which the understanding says, 
or seems to say, one thing, impassioned nature another; and, 
in poetry, at least, Cicero's great rule will be found to fail — 
that "nunquam aHud natura, aHud sapientia dicit;" if, at least, 
we understand sapientia to mean dispassionate good sense. 
How, for instance, could plain good sense — how could the 
very finest understanding — have told any man, beforehand, 
that love in excess, amongst its other modes of waywardness, 



406 DE QUINCEY 

was capable of prompting such appellations as that of "wretch" 
to the beloved object? Yet, as a fact, as an absolute fact of the 
experience, it is undeniable that it is among the impulses of 
love, in extremity, to clothe itself in the language of disparage- 
ment — why, is yet to be explained. 

" Perhaps 'tis pretty 
To mutter and mock a broken charm; 
To dally with wrong that does no harm; 
Perhaps 'tis pretty to tie together 
Thoughts so all unlike each other; 
To feel, at each wild word, within, 
A sweet recoil of love and pity. 
And what if, in a world of sin," etc., etc. 

That is Coleridge's solution; and the amount of it is — first, 
that it is delightful to call up what we know to be a mere 
mimicry of evil, in order to feel its non-reality; to dally with 
phantoms of pain that do not exist: secondly, that such lan- 
guage acts by way of contrast, making the love more prom- 
inent by the contradictoriness of its expression: thirdly, that 
in a world of sin, where evil passions are so often called into 
action, and have thus matured the language of violence in a 
service of malignity, naturally enough the feeling of violence 
and excess stumbles into its old forms of expression, even 
when the excess happens to lie in the very opposite direction. 
All this seems specious, and is undoubtedly some part of the 
solution; and the verses are so fancifully beautiful, that they 
would recommend even a worse philosophy. But, after all, I 
doubt if the whole philosophy be given: and in a similar 
attempt of Charles Lamb's, the case is not so much solved as 
further illustrated and amplified. Finally, if solved completely, 
this case is but one of multitudes which are furnished by the 
English drama: but (and I would desire no better test of the 
essential inferiority, attaching to the French drama — no bet- 
ter argument of its having grown out of a radically lower 
nature) there is not, from first to last, throughout that vaunted 
field of the French literature, one case of what I may denom- 
inate the antinomies of passion — cases of self-conflict, in which 
the understanding says one thing, the impassioned nature of 
man says another thing. This is a great theme, however, and 
I dismiss it to a separate discussion. 

So far, however, as I have noticed it, this question has arisen 
naturally out of the account, as I was endeavouring to sketch it, 
of Wordsworth's attachment to nature in her grandest forms. 
It grew out of solitude and the character of his own mind; 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 407 

but the mode of its growth was indirect and unconscious, and 
in the midst of other more boyish or more worldly pursuits; 
and that which happened to the boy in mimicking the owls 
happened also to him. In moments of watching for the pas- 
sage of woodcocks over the hills in moonlight nights, in order 
that he might snare them, oftentimes the dull gaze of expecta- 
tion, after it was becoming hopeless, left him liable to effects 
of mountain scenery under accidents of nightly silence and 
solitude, which impressed themselves with a depth for which 
a full tide of success would have allowed no opening. And, as 
he lived and grew amongst such scenes from childhood to 
manhood, many thousands of such opportunities had leisure 
to improve themselves into permanent effects of character, of 
feeling, and of taste. Like Michael, he was in the heart of 
many thousand mists. Many a sight, moreover, such as meets 
the eye rarely of any, except those who haunt the hills and the 
tarns at all hours,* and all seasons of the year, had been seen, 
and neglected perhaps at the time, but afterwards revisited the 
eye and produced its appropriate effect in silent hours of medi- 
tation. In everything, perhaps except in the redundant 
graciousness of heart which formed so eminent a feature in the 
moral constitution of that true philosopher; the character, the 
sensibility, and the taste of Wordsworth, pursued the same 
course of development as ' in the education of the Scotch 
Pedler,* who gives so much of the movement to the progress 
of " The Excursion." 

One of the most interesting among the winter amusements 
of the Hawkshead boys was that of skating on the adjacent 
lake. Esthwaite Water is not one of the deep lakes, as its 
neighbours of Windermere, Coniston, and Grasmere are: con- 
sequently, a very slight duration of frost is sufficient to freeze 
it into a bearing strength. In this respect, Wordsworth found 
the same advantages in his boyhood as afterwards at the Uni- 
versity: for the county of Cambridge is generally liable to 
shallow waters ; and that University breeds more good skaters 
than all the rest of England. About the year 18 10, by way of 
expressing an interest in " The Friend," which Coleridge was 
just at that time publishing in weekly numbers, Wordsworth 
allowed Coleridge to print an extract from the poem on his 
own life, descriptive of the games celebrated upon the ice of 
Esthwaite by all who were able to skate : the mimic chases of 
hare and hounds, pursued long after the last orange gleam 
of light had died away from the western horizon — oftentimes 
far into the night — a circumstance which does not speak much 



4o8 DE QUINCEY 

for the discipline of the schools — or rather, perhaps, does 
speak much for the advantages of a situation so pure, and free 
from the usual perils of a town, as this primitive village of 
Hawkshead. Wordsworth, in this descriptive passage-— 
which I wish that I had at this moment the means of citing, in 
order to amplify my account of his earliest tyrocinium — speaks 
of himself as frequently wheeling aside from his joyous com- 
panions to cut across the image of a star; and thus already, 
in the midst of sportiveness, and by a movement of sportive- 
ness, half unconsciously to himself expressing the growing 
necessity of retirement to his habits of thought. At another 
period of the year, when the golden summer allowed the 
students a long season of early play before the studies of the 
day began, he describes himself as roaming hand-in-hand, with 
one companion, along the banks of Esthwaite Water, chant- 
ing, with one voice, the verses of Goldsmith and of Gray — 
verses which, at the time of recording the fact, he had come to 
look upon as either in parts false in the principles of their com- 
position, or, at any rate, as wofully below the tone of high 
poetic passion; but which at that time of life, when the pro- 
founder feelings were as yet only germinating, filled them with 
an enthusiasm which he describes as brighter than the dreams 
of fever or of wine. 

Meanwhile, how prospered the classical studies which 
formed the main business of Wordsworth at Hawkshead? 
Not, in all probability, very well; for, though Wordsworth is 
at this day a very sufficient master of the Latin language, and 
reads certain favourite authors, especially Horace, with a critical 
nicety, and with a feeling for the felicities of his composition 
that probably few have ever felt, I have reason to think that 
little of this skill had been obtained at Hawkshead. As to 
Greek, that is a language which Wordsworth has never had 
energy enough to cultivate with efifect. 

From Hawkshead, and I believe after he had entered his 
eighteenth year, (a time which is tolerably early on the English 
plan,) probably at the latter end of the year 1787, Wordsworth 
entered at St. John's College, Cambridge. St. John's ranks 
as the second college in Cambridge — the second as to numbers 
and influence, and general consideration; in the estimation of 
the Johnians as the first, or at least as coequal in all things with 
Trinity; from which, at any rate, the general reader will col- 
lect, that no such absolute supremacy is accorded to any 
society in Cambridge as in Oxford is accorded necessarily to 
Christ Church. The advantages of a large college are con- 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 409 

siderable, both to an idle man who wishes to lurk unnoticed 
in the crowd, and to the brilliant man, whose vanity could not 
be gratified by pre-eminence amongst a few. Wordsworth, 
though not idle as regarded his own pursuits, was so as 
regarded the pursuits of the place. With respect to them he 
felt — to use his own words — that his hour was not come; and 
that his doom for the present was a happy obscurity, which 
left him, unvexed by the torments of competition, to the genial 
enjoyment of his Ufe in its most genial hours. 

It will excite some astonishment when I mention that, on 
cominff to Cambridge, Wordsworth actually assumed the beau, 
or, in modern slang, the "dandy." He dressed in silk stockings, 
had his hair powdered; and in all things plumed himself on his 
gentlemanly habits. To those who remember the slovenly 
dress of his middle and philosophic life, this will furnish matter 

for a smile. ^ . • 1 • rr 

Stranger still it is to tell, that, for the first time in his life, 
Wordsworth got " bouzy " at Cambridge. It is but fair to add, 
that the first time was also the last time. But perhaps the 
strangest part of the story is the occasion of this drunkenness; 
which was in celebration of his first visit to the very rooms 
at Christ College once occupied by Milton — intoxication by 
way of homage to the most temperate of men, and this homage 
offered by one who has turned out himself to the full as tem- 
perate ! Still one must grant a privilege — and he would be a 
churl that could frown on such a claim — a privilege and char- 
ter of large enthusiasm to such an occasion. And an older 
man than Wordsworth, at that era not fully nineteen, and a 
man even without a poet's blood in his veins, might have leave 
to forget his sobriety in such circumstances. Besides that, 
after all I have heard, from Wordsworth's own lips, that he 
was not' too far gone to attend chapel decorously durmg the 
very acme of his elevation. r- t t. > 

The rooms which Wordsworth occupied at St. John s were 
singularly circumstanced; mementos of what is highest and 
what is lowest in human things solicited the eye and ear all day 
lone If the occupant approached the out-doors prospect in 
one direction, there was visible through the great windows m 
the adjacent chapel of Trinity, the statue of Newton with his 
silent face and prism," memorials of the abstracting mtellect, 
serene and absolute, emancipated from fleshly bonds. On the 
other hand, immediately below, stood the college kitchen; and 
in that region, from noon to dewy eye, resounded the shrill 
voice of scolding from the female ministers of the head cook, 



4IO DE QUINCEY 

never suffering the mind to forget one of the meanest among 
human necessities. Wordsworth, however, as one who passed 
much of his time in social gayety, was less in the way of this 
annoyance than a profounder student would have been. Prob- 
ably he studied little beyond French and Italian during his 
Cambridge life; not however at any time forgetting (as I had 
so much reason to complain, when speaking of my Oxonian 
contemporaries) the literature of his own country. It is true 
that he took the regular degree of A. B., and in the regular 
course; but this was won in those days by a mere nominal 
examination, unless where the mathematical attainments of the 
student prompted his ambition to contest the honourable dis- 
tinction of Senior Wrangler. This, in common with all other 
honours of the University, is won in our days with far severer 
effort than in that age of relaxed discipline; but at no period 
could it have been won, let the malicious and the scornful say 
what they will, without an amount of mathematical skill very 
much beyond what has ever been exacted of its alumni by any 
other European university. Wordsworth was a profound 
admirer of the sublimer mathematics; at least of the higher 
geometry. The secret of this admiration for geometry lay in 
the antagonism between this world of bodiless abstraction and 
the world of passion. And here I may mention appropriately, 
and I hope without any breach of confidence, that, in a great 
philosophic poem of Wordsworth's, which is still in manu- 
script, and will remain in manuscript until after his death, 
there is, at the opening of one of the books, a dream, which 
reaches the very ne plus ultra of subHmity in my opinion, 
expressly framed to illustrate the eternity and the independ- 
ence of all social modes or fashions of existence, conceded to 
these two hemispheres, as it were, that compose the total world 
of human power — mathematics on the one hand, poetry on 
the other. 

" The one that held acquaintance with the stars, 

undisturbed by space or time; 

The other that was a god — yea, many gods — 
Had voices more than all the winds, and was 
A joy, a consolation, and a hope." 

I scarcely know whether I am entitled to quote — as my 
memory (though not refreshed by a sight of the poem for more 
than twenty years) would well enable me to do — any long 
extract ; but thus much I may allowably say, as it cannot in any 
way affect Mr. Wordsworth's interests, that the form of the 
drama is as follows; and, by the way, even this form is not 



I 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 4 1 1 

arbitrary; but, with exquisite skill in the art of composition, is 
made to arise out of the situation in which the poet had pre- 
viously found himself, and is faintly prefigured in the elements 
of that situation. He had been reading " Don Quixote "by 
the seaside; and, oppressed by the heat of the sun, he had fallen 
asleep whilst gazing on the barren sands before him. He 
dreams that, walking in some sandy wilderness of Africa, some 
endless Zahara, he sees, at a distance 

" An Arab of the desert, lance in rest, 
Mounted upon a dromedary." 

The Arab rides forward to meet him; and the dreamer per- 
ceives, in the countenance of the rider, the agitation of fear, 
and that he often looks behind him in a troubled way, whilst m 
his hand he holds two books — one of which is Euchd's " Ele- 
ments;" the other, which is a book and yet not a book, seeming, 
in fact, a shell as well as a book, sometimes neither, and yet 
both at once. The Arab directs him to apply his ear; upon 
which — 

" In an unknown tongue, which yet I understood." 

the dreamer says that he heard 

*' A wild prophetic blast of harmony, 
An ode, as if in passion utter'd, that foretold 
Destruction to the people of this earth 
By deluge near at hand." 

The Arab, with grave countenance, assures him that it is even 
so; that all was true which had been said; and that he himself 
was riding upon a divine mission, having it in charge 

"To bury those two books; 
The one that held acquaintance with the stars," etc. 

that is, in effect, to secure the two great interests of poetry and 
mathematics from sharing in the watery ruin. As he talks, 
suddenly the dreamer perceives that the Arab's 

" countenance grew more disturb'd," 

and that his eye was often reverted; upon which the dreaming 
poet also looks along the desert in the same direction: and in 
the far horizon he descries 

" a glittering light." 

What is it? he asks of the Arab rider. "It is," said he, "the 
waters of the earth," that even then were travelling on their 



412 DE QUINCE Y 

awful errand. Upon which, the poet sees this apostle of the 
desert riding off, 

*' With the fleet waters of the world in chase of him." 
The sketch I have here given of this sublime dream suffi- 
ciently attests the interest which Wordsworth took in the pecu- 
liar studies of the place, and the exalted privilege which he 
ascribed to them of co-eternity with " the vision and the faculty 
divine ^' of the poet — the destiny common to both, of an end- 
less triumph over the ruins of nature and time. Meantime, he 
himself travelled no farther in these studies than through the 
six elementary books, usually selected from the fifteen of 
EucHd. Whatever might be the interests of this speculative 
understanding, whatever his admiration, practically he devoted 
himself to the more agitating interests of man, social and 
political, just then commencing that vast career of revolution 
which has never since been still or stationary; interests which, 
in his mind, alternated, however, with another and different 
interest, in the grander forms of external nature, as found in 
mountainous regions. In obedience to this latter passion, it 
was — for a passion it had become — that during one of his 
long Cambridge vacations, stretching from June to November, 
he went over to Switzerland and Savoy, for a pedestrian excur- 
sion amongst the Alps; taking with him, for his travelling com- 
panion, a certain Mr. J , of whom (excepting that he is 

once apostrophized in a sonnet, written at Calais in the year 
1802) I never happened to hear him speak: whence I presume 

to infer, that Mr. J owed this flattering distinction, not so 

much to any intellectual graces of his society, as, perhaps, to his 
powers of administering " punishment " (in the language of the 
fancy) to restive and mutinous landlords — for such were abroad 
in those days; people who presented huge reckonings with one 
hand, and, with the other, a huge cudgel, by way of opening the 
traveller's eyes to the propriety of paying them without demur. 
I do not positively know this to have been the case; but I have 
heard Wordsworth speak of the ruffian landlords who played 
upon his youth in the Orisons; and, however well qualified to 
fight his own battles, he might find, amongst such savage 
mountaineers, two combatants better than one. 

Wordsworth's route, on this occasion, lay, at first, through 
Austrian Flanders, then (1788, I think) on the fret for an insur- 
rectionary war against the capricious innovations of the 
Imperial coxcomb, Joseph 11. He passed through the camps 
then forming, and thence ascended the Rhine to Switzerland; 
crossed the great St. Bernard; visited the Lake of Como, and 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 413 



Other interesting scenes in the North of Italy, where, by the 
way, the tourists were benighted in a forest — having, in some 
way or other, been misled by the Italian clocks, and their pecu- 
liar fashion of striking round to twenty-four o'clock. On his 
return, Wordsworth published a quarto pamphlet of verses, 
describing, with very considerable effect and brilliancy, the 
grand scenery amongst which he had been moving. This 
poem, as well as another in the same quarto form, describing 
the English lake scenery of Westmoreland and Cumberland, 
addressed, by way of letter, "to a young lady," (viz. Miss Words- 
worth,) are remarkable, in the first place, as the earliest effort 
of Wordsworth in verse, at least as his earliest publications, 
but, in the second place, and still more so, from their style of 
composition. 'Ture description," even where it cannot be said, 
sneeringly, "to hold the place of sense," is so little attractive as 
the direct or exclusive object of a poem, and in reality it exacts 
so powerful an effort on the part of the reader to realize visu- 
ally, or make into an apprehensible unity the scattered elements 
and circumstances brought together, that, inevitably and rea- 
sonably, it can never hope to be a popular form of composi- 
tion; else it is highly probable that these '^Descriptive Sketches 
of Wordsworth, though afterwards condemned as vicious in 
their principles of composition, by his own maturer taste, would 
really have gained him a high momentary notoriety with the 
public, had they been fairly brought under its notice: whilst, 
on the other hand, his revolutionary principles of composition, 
and his purer taste, ended in obtaining for him nothing but 
scorn and ruffian insolence. This seems marvellous; but, in 
fact, it is not so: it seems, I mean, prima facie marvellous, that 
the inferior models should be fitted to gain a far higher reputa- 
tion; but the secret hes here — that these were in a taste, which 
though frequently spurious and hollow, had been long recon- 
ciled to the pubHc feelings, and which, besides, have a specific 
charm for certain minds, even apart from all fashions of the 
day; whereas, the other had to struggle against sympathies 
long trained in an opposite direction, to which the recovery of 
a healthier tone (even where nature had made it possible) pre- 
supposed a difficult process of weaning, and an effort of dis- 
cipline for reorganizing the whole internal economy of the 
sensibilities, that is both painful and mortifying: for — and that 
is worthy of deep attention — the misgivings of any vicious or 
unhealthy state; the impulses and suspicious gleams of the 
truth struggling with cherished error; the instincts of light con- 
flicting with darkness — these are the real causes of that hatred 



414 DE QUINCEY 

and intolerant scorn which is ever awakened by the first dawn- 
ings of new and important systems of truth. Therefore it is 
that Christianity was so much more hated than any mere novel 
variety of error. Therefore are the first feeble struggles of 
Nature towards a sounder state of health, always harsh and dis- 
cordant; for the false system which this change for the better 
disturbs, had, at least, this soothing advantage — that it was 
self-consistent. Therefore, also, was the Wordsworthian resto- 
ration of elementary power, and of a higher or transcendent 
truth of Nature, (or, as some people vaguely expressed the 
case, of simplicity,) received at first with such malignant dis- 
gust. For there was a galvanic awakening in the shock of 
power, as it jarred against the ancient system of prejudices, 
which inevitably revealed so much of truth as made the mind 
jealous that all was not right, and just so far afifected as to be 
dissatisfied with its existing creed, but not at all raised up to the 
level of the new creed; enlightened enough to descry its own 
wanderings, but not enough to recover the right road. 

The more energetic, the more spasmodically potent are the 
throes of Nature towards her own re-estabHshment in the cases 
of suspended animation, by drowning, strangling, etc., the more 
keen is the anguish of revival. And, universally, a transition 
state is a state of sufifering and disquiet. Meantime, the early 
poems of Wordsworth, that might have suited the public taste 
so much better than his more serious efforts, if the fashion of 
the hour, or the sanction of a leading review, or the prestige 
of a name in the author, had happened to give them a season's 
currency, did in fact drop unnoticed into the market. Nowhere 
have I seen them quoted, no, not even since the author's vic- 
torious establishment in the public admiration. The reason 
may be, however, that not many copies were printed at first; no 
subsequent edition was ever called for; and yet, from growing 
interest in the author, every copy of the small impression had 
been studiously bought up. Indeed, I myself went to the pub- 
lishers (Johnson's) as early as 1805 or 1806, and bought up all 
the remaining copies, (which were but six or seven of the 
Foreign Sketches, and two or three of the English,) as presents, 
and as future curiosities in literature to literary friends, whose 
interest in Wordsworth might assure one of a due value being 
put upon the poem. Were it not for this extreme scarcity, I 
am disposed to think that many lines or passages would long 
ere this have been made familiar to the public ear. Some are 
delicately, some forcibly picturesque; and the selection of cir- 
cumstances is occasionally very original and felicitous. In 



t 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH ^15 

particular, I remember this one, which presents an accident in 
rural life that must by thousands of repetitions have become 
intimately known to every dweller in the country, and yet had 
never before been consciously taken up for a poet s use. After 
having described the domestic cock as "sweetly ferocious — 
a prettiness of phraseology which he borrows from an Italian 
author — he notices those competitions or defiances which are 
so often carried on interchangeably from great distances: — 

" Echo'd by faintly answering farms remote." 

This is the beautiful line in which he has caught and preserved 
so ordinary an occurrence — one, in fact, of the commonplaces, 
which lend animation and a moral interest to rural hfe. 

After his return from this Swiss excursion, Wordsworth took 
up his parting residence at Cambridge, and prepared for a final 
adieu to academic pursuits and academic society. 

It was about this period that the French Revolution broke 
out; and the reader who would understand its appalling effects 
— its convulsing, revolutionary effects upon Worcisworth s 
heart and soul — should consult the history of the Solitary, as 
eiven by himself in "The Excursion;" for that picture is 
undoubtedly a leaf from the personal experience of 
Wordsworth: 

" From that dejection I was roused — 
But how?" etc. 

Miehty was the transformation which it wrought in the whole 
economy of his thoughts; miraculous almost was the expansion 
which it eave to his human sympathies; chiefly m this it showed 
its effects — in throwing the thoughts inwards into grand medi- 
tations upon man, his final destiny, his ultimate capacities of 
elevation; and, secondly, in giving to the whole system of the 
thoughts and feelings a firmer tone, and a sense of the awful 
realities which surround the mind; by comparison with which 
the previous literary tastes seemed (even where they were fine 
and elegant, as in Collins, or Gray, unless where they had the 
self-sufiicing reality of religion, as in Cowper) fanciful and 
trivial In all lands this result was accomplished, and at the 
same time: Germany, above all, found her new literature the 
mere creation and product of this great moral tempest; and m 
Germany or England alike, the poetry was so entirely regen- 
erated, thrown into moulds of thought and of feeling so new — 
so primary — so different from the old worn-out channels in 
which they had been trained to flow — that the poets every- 



41 6 DE QUINCEY 

where felt themselves to be putting away childish things, and 
now at length — now first (as regarded the eighteenth cen- 
tury) entering upon the dignity and the sincere thinking of 
mature manhood. 

Wordsworth, it is well known to all who know anything of 
his history, felt himself so fascinated by the gorgeous festival 
era of the Revolution — that era, when the sleeping snakes 
which afterwards stung the national felicity were yet covered 
with flowers — that he went over to Paris, and spent about one 
entire year between that city, Orleans, and Blois. There, in 
fact, he continued to reside almost too long. He had been 
sufficiently connected with public men to have drawn upon 
himself some notice from those who afterwards composed the 
Committee of Public Safety. And, as an Englishman, when 
the war had once obliterated the too fervent and too indulgent 
partiality, which, at an earlier period of the revolutionary move- 
ment, had settled upon the English name, he became an object 
of gloomy suspicion with those even who would have grieved 
that he should fall a victim to undistinguishing popular vio- 
lence. Already for England, and in her behalf, he was thought 
to be that spy which (as Mr. Coleridge tells us, in his " Bio- 
graphia Literaria ") afterwards he was accounted by Mr. Pitt's 
emissaries, in the worst of services against her. I doubt, how- 
ever, (let me say it, by the way, without impeachment of Mr. 
Coleridge's veracity — for he was easily duped,) this whole 
story about Mr. Pitt's Somersetshire spies; and it has often 
struck me with astonishment, that Mr. Coleridge should have 
suffered his personal pride to take so false a direction as to 
court the humble distinction of having been suspected as a 
spy, in those very years when poor empty tympanies of men, 

such as G , Thelwall, Holcroft, were actually recognized as 

enemies of the state, and worthy of a State surveillance, by Min- 
isters so blind and grossly misinformed, as, on this point, were 
Pitt and Dundas. Had I been Coleridge, instead of saving 
Mr. Pitt's reputation with posterity by ascribing to him a 
jealousy which he or his agents had not the discernment to 
cherish, I would have boldly planted myself upon the fact, the 
killing fact, that he had utterly despised both myself, Coleridge 
to wit, and Wordsworth — even with Dogberry, I would have 
insisted upon that — "Set down, also, that I am an ass!" I 
would have exulted in this fact; it should have been my glory 
— namely, that two men, whom, in their intellectual faculties, 
posterity will acknowledge as equal to any age, were scorned 
and slighted as too contemptible for fear; whilst others, so gross 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 4 1 7 

and vulgar in style of mind as this Holcroft, this Thelwall, this 
— (what is his name?) — were as brainlessly feared by Mr. 
Pitt's cabinet as ever Bottom was adored by Titania. What 
a perversion of pride! that Coleridge should have sought, by 
lending his ear to fables which Wordsworth's far sterner prin- 
ciple views as Hes/ to gain the fanciful honour of standing upon 
Mr. Pitt's pocket-list of traitors and French spies; when, after 
all, they stood confessedly in that list as tenth-rate and most 
inconsiderable villains. Heavens ! that was a strange ambition, 
that, rather than be wholly forgotten by Mr. Pitt, (in which 
fate there was, by possibility, a great dignity,) would seek to 
figure amongst the very rear-guard of his traitors ! 

In France, however, Wordsworth had a chance, in good 
earnest, for passing for the traitor, that, in England, no rational 
person ever thought him. He had chosen his friends care- 
lessly; nor could any man, the most sagacious, have chosen 
them safely, in a time when the internal schisms of the very 
same general party brought with them worse hostilities and 
more personal perils than even, upon the broader divisions of 
party, could have attended the most ultra professions of anti- 
national politics, and when the rapid changes of position shifted 
the peril from month to month. One individual is specially 
recorded by Wordsworth, in the poem on his own life, as a man 
of the highest merit, and personal qualities the most brilliant, 
who ranked first upon the list of Wordsworth's friends; and 
this man was so far a safe friend, at one moment, as he was a 
republican general — finally, indeed, a commander-in-chief. 
This was Beaupuis; and the description of his character and 
position is singularly interesting. There is, in fact, a special 
value and a use about the case: it opens one's eyes feelingly 
to the fact, that, even in this thoughtless people, so full of 
vanity and levity — nevertheless, the awful temper of the times, 
and the dread burthen of human interests with which it was 
charged — had called to a consciousness of new duties — had 
summoned to an audit, as if at some great final tribunal, even 
the gay, radiant creatures that, under less solemn auspices, 
under the reign of a Francis I, or a Louis XIV, would have 
been the merest painted butterflies of the court-sunshine. This 
Beaupuis was a man of superb person — beautiful in a degree 
which made him a model of male beauty, both as to face and 
figure; and, accordingly, in a land where conquests of that 
nature were so easy, and the subjects of so trifling an eflfort, he 
had been distinguished, to his own as well as the public eyes, 
by a rapid succession of bonnes fortunes amongst women. 
27 



41 8 DE QUINCEY 

Such, and so glorified by triumphs the most unquestionable 
and flattering, had the earthquake of the revolution found him. 
From that moment, he had no leisure, not a thought, to 
bestow upon his former selfish and frivolous pursuits. He was 
hurried, as one inspired by some high apostolic passion, into 
the service of the unhappy and desolate serfs amongst his own 
countrymen — such as are described, at an earlier date, by 
Madame de Sevigne, as the victims of feudal institutions; and 
one day as he was walking with Wordsworth in the neighbour- 
hood of Orleans, and they had turned into a little quiet lane, 
leading off from a heath, suddenly they came upon the follow- 
ing spectacle: A girl, seventeen or eighteen years old, hun- 
ger-bitten, and wasted to a meagre shadow, was knitting, in a 
dejected, drooping way; whilst to her arm was attached, by a 
rope, the horse, equally famished, that earned the miserable 
support of her family. Beaupuis comprehended the scene in a 
moment; and seizing Wordsworth by the arm, he said — "Dear 
English friend ! — brother from a nation of freemen ! — that it 
is that is the curse of our people, in their widest division; and 
to cure this, it is, as well as to maintain our work against the 
kings of the earth, that blood must be shed and tears must flow 
for many years to come ! " At that time, the revolution had not 
fulfilled its purposes; as yet, the King was on the throne; the 
fatal loth of August, 1792, had not dawned; and, as yet, there 
was safety for a subject of kings.^ The irresistible stream was 
hurrying forwards. The King fell; and (to pause for a 
moment) how divinely is the fact recorded by Wordsworth, in 
the manuscript poem on his own life, placing the awful scenes 
past and passing in Paris, under a pathetic relief from the 
description of the golden, autumnal day, sleeping in sunshine — 

" When I 
Towards the fierce metropolis bent my steps 
The homeward road to England. From his throne 
The King had fallen " — etc. 

What a picture does he give of the fury which there possessed 
the public mind; of the frenzy which shone in every eye, and 
through every gesture ; of the stormy groups assembled at the 
Palais Royal, or the Tuilleries, with " hissing factionists " for- 
ever in their centre, "hissing" from the self-baffling of their own 
madness, and incapable from wrath of speaking clearly; of 
fear already creeping over the manners of multitudes; of 
stealthy movements through back streets ; plotting and counter- 
plotting in every family; feuds to extermination, dividing chil- 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 



419 



dren of the same house forever; scenes such as those of the 
Chapel Royal, (now silenced on that pubHc stage,) repeating 
themselves daily amongst private friends; and, to show the uni- 
versality of this maniacal possession — that it was no narrow 
storm discharging its fury by local concentration upon a single 
city, but that it overspread the whole realm of France — a pic- 
ture is given, wearing the same features, of what passed daily at 
Orleans, Blois, and other towns. The citizens are described in 
the attitudes they assumed at the daily coming in of the post 
from Paris; the fierce sympathy is portrayed, with which they 
echoed back the feelings of their compatriots in the capital; 
men of all parties had been there up to this time; aristocrats 
as well as democrats — and one in particular of the former 
class is put forward as a representative of his class. This man, 
duly as the hour arrived which brought the Parisian news- 
papers, read restlessly of the tumults and insults amongst which 
the Royal Family now passed their days; of the decrees by 
which his own order were threatened or assailed; of the self- 
expatriation, now continually swelHng in amount, as a measure 
of despair on the part of myriads, as well priests as gentry — 
all this and worse he read in public; and still as he read, 

"his Land 
Haunted his sword like an uneasy spot 
In his own body." 

In short, as there never has been so strong a national con- 
vulsion diffused so widely with equal truth, it may be asserted 
that no describer, so powerful, or idealizing so magnificently 
what he deals with, has ever been a real livirg spectator of 
parallel scenes. The French, indeed, it may be said, are far 
enough from being a people profound in feeling. True; but 
of all people, they most exhibit their feeling on the surface; 
are the most demonstrative (to use a modern term) ; and most 
of all mark their feelings by outward expression of gesticulation 
and fervent enunciation: not to insist upon the obvious truth 
— that even a people of shallow feeling may be deeply moved 
by tempests which uproot the forest of a thousand years' 
growth; by changes in the very organization of society, that 
throw all things, for a time, into one vast anarchy; and by 
murderous passions, alternately the effect and the cause of that 
same chaotic anarchy. Now, it was in this autumn of 1792, 
as I have already said, that Wordsworth parted finally from 
his illustrious friend — for, all things considered, he may be 
justly so entitled — the gallant Beaupuis. This great season 



420 DE QUINCEY 

of public trial had searched men's natures ; revealed their real 
hearts; brought into light and action qualities oftentimes not 
suspected by their possessors; and had thrown men, as in ele- 
mentary states of society, each upon his own native resources, 
unaided by the old conventional forces of rank and birth. 
Beaupuis had shone to unusual advantage under this general 
trial ; he had discovered, even to the philosophic eye of Words- 
worth, a depth of benignity, very unusual in a Frenchman; and 
not of local, contracted benignity, but of large, illimitable apos- 
tolic devotion to the service of the poor and the oppressed — 
a fact the more remarkable as he had all the pretensions in his 
own person of high birth and high rank; and, so far as he had 
any personal interest embarked in the struggle, should have 
alHed himself with the aristocracy. But of selfishness in any 
shape, he had no vestiges; or, if he had, it showed itself in a 
slight tinge of vanity ; yet, no — it was not vanity, but a radiant 
quickness of sympathy with the eye which expressed admiring 
love — sole relic of the chivalrous devotion once limited to the 
service of ladies. Now, again, he put on the garb of chivalry; 
it was a chivalry the noblest in the world, which opened his 
ear to the Pariah and the oppressed all over his mis-organized 
country. A more apostolic fervour of holy zealotry in this 
great cause, had not been seen since the days of Bartholomew 
las Casas, who showed the same excess of feeling in another 
direction. This sublime dedication of his being to a cause 
which, in his conception of it, extinguished all petty considera- 
tions for himself, arid made him thenceforwards a creature of 
the national will — "a son of France," in a more eminent and 
loftier sense than according to the heraldry of Europe — had 
extinguished even his sensibility to the voice of worldly honour: 
"injuries," says Wordsworth — 

** injuries 
Made him more gracious." 

And so utterly had he submitted his own will or separate inter- 
ests to the transcendent voice of his country, which, in the 
main, he believed to be now speaking authentically for the first 
time since the foundations of Christendom, that, even against 
the motions of his own heart, he adopted the hatreds of the 
young Republic, growing cruel in his purposes towards the 
ancient oppressor, out of very excess of love for the oppressed ; 
and, against the voice of his own order, as well as in stern 
oblivion of many early friendships, he became the champion of 
democracy in the struggle everywhere commencing with preju- 
dice or feudal privilege. Nay, he went so far upon the line of 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 42 1 

this new crusade against the evils of the world, that he even 
accepted, with a conscientious defiance of his own inevitable 
homage to the erring spirit of loyalty embarked upon that 
cause a comrtiission in the RepubHcan armies preparmg to 
move' against La Vendee; and, finally, in that cause, as com- 
mander-in-chief, he laid down his life. " He perished," says 
Wordsworth 

"perished, fighting in supreme command, 

Upon the banks of the unhappy Loire." 

Homewards fled all the English from a land which now was 
fast filling its prisons, and making ready the shambles for its 
noblest citizens. Thither also came Wordsworth; and then he 
spent his time for a year and more, in London chiefly, over- 
whelmed with shame and despondency for the disgrace and 
scandal brought upon liberty by the atrocities committed in 
that holy name. Upon this subject he dwells with deep emo- 
tion in the poem on his own life; and he records the awful tri- 
umph for retribution accompHshed, which possessed him when 
crossing the sands of the great Bay of Morecamb from Lan- 
caster to Ulverstone; and hearing from a horseman who passed 
him, in reply to his question — Was there any news? — "Yes, 
that Robespierre had perished." Immediately, a passion seized 
him, a transport of almost epileptic fervour, prompting him as he 
stood alone upon this perilous ' waste of sands, to shout aloud 
anthems of thanksgiving for this great vindication of eternal 
justice. Still, though justice was done upon one great traitor 
to the cause, the cause itself was overcast with clouds too 
heavily to find support and employment for the hopes of a poet 
who had believed in a golden era ready to open upon the pros- 
pects of human nature. It gratified and solaced his heart, that 
the indignation of mankind should have wreaked itself upon the 
chief monsters that had outraged their nature and their hopes; 
but for the present he found it necessary to comfort his disap- 
pointment, by turning away from politics to studies less capable 
of deceiving his expectations. 

From this period, therefore — that is, from the year 1794-95 

we may date the commencement of Wordsworth's entire 

self-dedication to poetry as the study and main business of his 
life. Somewhere about this period, also, (though, according 
to my remembrance of what Miss Wordsworth once told me, 
I think one year or so later,) his sister joined him; and they 
began to keep house together; ' once at Race Down, in Dorset- 
shire* once at Clevedon, on the coast of Somersetshire; then 



42 2 DE QUINCEY 

amongst the Quantock Hills, in the same county, or in that 
neighbourhood; and, at length, at Alfoxton, a beautiful coun- 
try-house, with a grove and shrubbery attached, belonging to 
Mr. St. Aubyn, a minor, and let (I believe) on the terms of 
keeping the house in repair. Whilst resident at this last place 
it was, as I have generally understood, and in the year 1797 or 
1798, that Wordsworth first became acquainted with Coleridge; 
though, possibly, in the year I am wrong; for it occurs to me 
that, in a poem published in 1796, there is an allusion to a 
young writer of the name of Wordsworth, as one who had 
something austere in his style, but otherwise was more original 
than any other poet of the age; and it is probable that this, 
and knowledge of the poetry, would be subsequent to a per- 
sonal knowledge of the author, considering the little circulation 
which any poetry of a Wordsworthian stamp would be likely to 
attain at that time. 

Notes 

*Who must now (1854) be classed as the late Earl. 

' By the way, in the lamented Eliot Warburton's " Prince Rupert," 
this book, by a very excusable mistake, is always cited as the " Eicon 
Basilicon; " he was thinking of the " Doron Bascilicon " written by 
Charles's father; each of the nouns Eicon and Doron, having the same 
terminal syllable — " on " — it was most excusable to forget that the first 
belonged to an imparisyllabic declension, so as to be feminine, the 
second not so; which made it neuter. With respect lo the great 
standing question as to the authorship of the work, I have myself 
always held, that the natural freedom of judgment in this case has 
been intercepted by one strong prepossession (entirely false) from the 
very beginning. The minds of all people have been pre-occupied with 
the notion, that Dr. Gauden, the reputed author, obtained his bishopric 
confessedly on the credit of that service. Lord Clarendon, it is said, 
who hated the doctor, nevertheless gave him a bishopric, on the sole 
ground of his having written the " Eicon." The inference, therefore, 
is — that the Prime Minister, who gave so reluctantly, must have given 
under an irresistible weight of proof that the doctor really had done 
the work for which so unwillingly he paid him. Any shade of doubt, 
such as could have justified Lord Clarendon in suspending this gift, 
would have been eagerly snatched at. Such a shade, therefore, there 
was not. Meantime the whole of this reasoning rests upon a false 
assumption: Dr. Gauden did not owe his bishopric to a belief (true 
or false) that he had written the " Eicon." The bishopric was given 
on another account; consequently it cannot, in any way of using the 
fact, at all affect the presumptions, small or great, which may exist 
separately for or against the doctor's claim on that head. 

^ In particular, and by way of giving an illustration, let me here 
mention one of those accidental revelations that unfold new aspects 
of nature; it was one that occurred to myself. I had gone up at all 
times of the morning and the year, to an eminence, or rather a vast 
field of eminences, above Scor Crag, in the rear of Allan Bank, a 
Liverpool gentleman's mansion, from which is descried the deep and 
gloomy valley of Great Langdale. Not, however, for many years, had 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 423 

it fiappened that I found myself standing in that situation about four 
o'clock on a summer afternoon. At length, and on a favourable day, 
this accident occurred; and the scene which I then beheld, was one 
which I shall not wholly forget to my dying day. The effects arose 
from the position of the sun and of the spectator, taken in connection 
with a pendulous mass of vapour, in which, however, were many rents 
and openings, and through them, far below, at an abyss-like depth, 
was seen the gloomy valley, its rare cottages, and " unrejoicing " fir- 
trees. I had beheld the scene many times before; I was familiar with 
its least important features, but now it was absolutely transfigured; 
it was seen under lights and mighty shadows, that made it no less 
marvellous to the eye than that memorable creation amongst the 
clouds and azure sky, which is described by the Solitary in " The 
Excursion." And, upon speaking of it to Wordsworth, I found that 
he had repeatedly witnessed the same impressive transfiguration; so 
that it is not evanescent, but dependent upon fixed and recoverable 
combinations of time and weather. 

* Among the various attempts to justify Wordsworth's choice of 
so humble and even mean an occupation for his philosopher, how 
strange that the weightiest argument of all should have been omitted — 
viz. the privilege attached to his functions of penetrating without 
ofifense, and naturally, and at periodic intervals, to every fireside. 

^The reader, who may happen not to have seen Mr. Coleridge's 
" Biographia Literaria," is informed that Mr. Coleridge tells a long 
story about a man who followed and dogged himself and Mr. Words- 
worth in all their rural excursions, under a commission (originally 
emanating from Mr. Pitt) for detecting some overt acts of treason, or 
treasonable correspondence; or, in default of either, some words of 
treasonable conversation. Unfortunately for his own interests as an 
active servant, capable of bagging a promising amount of game, 
within a week or so, even in a whole month, that spy had collected 
nothing at all as the basis of a report, excepting only something 
which they (Coleridge and Wordsworth, to Avit), were continually 
saying to each other, now in blame, now in praise, of one Spy Nosy; 
and this, praise and blame alike, the honest spy very naturally took 
to himself — seeing that the world accused him of having a nose of 
imreasonable dimensions, and his own conscience accused him of 
being a spy. " Now," says Mr. Coleridge, " the very fact was, that 
Wordsworth and I were constantly talking about Spinosa." This 
story makes a very good Joe Miller; but, for other purposes, is 
somewhat damaged. However, there is one excellent story in the 
case. Some country gentlemen from the neighbourhood of Nether 
Stowey, upon a party happening to discuss the probabilities that 
Wordsworth and Coleridge might be traitors and in correspondence, 
with the French Directory, answered thus: "Oh, as to that Coler- 
idge, he's a rattle-brain that will say more in a week than he will 
stand in a twelvemonth. But Wordsworth — that's the traitor; why 
God bless me, he's so close on the subject, that d — -n me if you 11 
ever hear him open his lips on the subject from year's end to years 

•How little has any adequate power as yet approached this great 
theme! Not the Grecian stage — not " the dark sorrows of the line of 
Thebes," in any of its scenes, unfolds such tragical grouping of cir- 
cumstances and situations as may be gathered from the memoirs of 
the time. The galleries and vast staircases of Versailles, at early 



424 DE QUINCEY 

dawn, on some of the greatest days — the tempestuous gathering of 
the mobs — the figure of the Duke of Orleans obscurely detected 
amongst them — the growing fury — the growing panic — the blind 
tumult — and the dimness of the event — all make up a scene worthy 
to blend with our time-hallowed images of Babylon or of Nineveh 
with the enemy in all her gates, Memphis or Jerusalem in their 
agonies. But, amongst all the exponents of the growing agitation that 
besieged the public mind, none is so profoundly impressive as the 
scene (every Sunday renewed) at the Chapel Royal. Even in the 
most penitential of the litanies, in the presence when most imme- 
diately confessed of God himself — when the antiphonies were 
chanted, one party singing, with fury and gnashing of teeth, " Salvum 
fac regem," and another, with equal hatred and fervour, answering 
" Et Reginam " — the organ roared into thunder — the semi-chorus 
swelled into shouting — the menaces into defiance — the agitation into 
tempestuous fury — again the crashing semi-chorus sang with shouts 
their " Salvum fac regem " — again the vengeful antiphony hurled back 
its " Et Reginam "— and one person, an eye-witness of these scenes, 
which mounted in violence on each successive Sunday, declares that, 
oftentimes, the semi-choral bodies were at the point of fighting with 
each other in the presence of the King. 

^ That tract of the Lake country which stretches southwards from 
Hawkshead and the lakes of Esthwaite, Windermere, and Coniston, to 
the little town of Ulverstone, (which may be regarded as the metropo- 
lis of the little romantic English Calabria, called Turness), is divided 
from the main part of Lancashire by the estuary of Morecamb. The 
sea retires with the ebb tide to a vast distance, leaving the sands 
passable for a few hours for horses and carriages. But partly from 
the daily variation in these hours, partly from the intricacy of the 
pathless track which must be pursued, and partly from the galloping 
pace at which the returning tide comes in, many fatal accidents are 
continually occurring — sometimes to the too venturous traveller 
who has slighted the aid of guides — sometimes to the guides them- 
selves when baffled and perplexed by mists. Gray, the poet, mentions 
one of the latter class, as having then recently occurred under affect- 
ing circumstances. Local tradition records a long list of interesting 
cases. 

® I do not, on consideration, know when they began to keep house 
together; but, by a passage in "The Prelude," they must have made 
a tour together as early as 1787. 



Ill 



IT was at Alfoxton that Miss Mary Hutchinson visited 
her cousins the Wordsworths ; and there, or previously, 
in the North of England, at Stockton-upon-Tees and 
Darlington, that the attachment began between Miss 
Hutchinson and Wordsworth, which terminated in their mar- 
riage about the beginning of the present century. The mar- 
riage took place in the North; somewhere, I believe in York- 
shire; and, immediately after the ceremony, Wordsworth 
brought his bride to Grasmere; in which most lovely of English 
valleys he had previously obtained, upon a lease of seven or 
eight years, the cottage in which I found him living at my 
first visit to him in November, 1807. I have heard ^that there 
was a paragraph inserted on this occasion in the Morning 
Post" or "Courier" — and I have an indistinct remembrance 
of having once seen it myself — which described this event 
of the poet's marriage in Ihe most ludicrous terms of silly 
pastoral sentimentality; the cottage being described as the 
abode of content and all the virtues," the vale itself in the 
same puerile slang, and the whole event in a style of allegorical 
trifling about the muses, etc. The masculine and severe taste 
of Wordsworth made him peculiarly open to annoyance from 
such absurd trifling; and, unless his sense of the ludicrous 
overpowered his graver feelings, he must have been much 
displeased with the paragraph. But, after all I have under- 
stood that the whole affair was an unseasonable jest of Coler- 
idge's or Lamb's. 1 , r • j 

To us who, in after years, were Wordsworth s friends, or 
at least intimate acquaintances — viz. to Professor Wilson and 
myself — the most interesting circumstance in this marriage, 
the one which perplexed us exceedingly, was the very possi- 
bility that it should ever have been brought to bear. I^or we 
could not conceive of Wordsworth as submitting his faculties 
to the humilities and devotion of courtship. That self-sur- 
render—that prostration of mind, by which a man is too 
happy and proud to express the profundity of his service to 
the woman of his heart — it seemed a mere impossibility that 
ever Wordsworth should be brought to feel for a single instant; 



425 



426 DE QUINCEY 

and what he did not sincerely feel, assuredly he was not the 
person to profess. Ah, happy, happy days! — in which, for 
a young man's heart that is deep and fervid in his affections, 
and passionate in his admirations, there is but one presence 
upon earth, one glory, one heaven of hope ! — days how fugi- 
tive, how incapable of return, how imperishable to the heart 
of all that a man has lived ! Wordsworth, I take it upon myself 
to say, had not the feelings within him which make this total 
devotion to a woman possible. There never lived the woman 
whom he would not have lectured and admonished under cir- 
cumstances that should have seemed to require it; nor would 
he have conversed with her in any mood whatever without 
wearing an air of mild condescension to her understanding. 
To lie at her feet, to make her his idol, to worship her very 
caprices, and to adore the most unreasonable of her frowns — 
these things were impossible to Wordsworth; and, being so, 
never could he, in any emphatic sense, have been a lover. 

A lover, therefore, in any passionate sense of the word, 
Wordsworth could not have been. And, moreover, it is 
remarkable that a woman who could dispense with that sort 
of homage in her suitor, is not of a nature to inspire such a 
passion. That same meekness which reconciles her to the 
tone of superiority and freedom in the manner of her suitor, 
and which may afterwards in a wife become a sweet domestic 
grace, strips her of that too charming irritation, captivating 
at once and tormenting, which lurks in feminine pride. If 
there be an enchantress's spell yet surviving in this age of ours, 
it is the haughty grace of maidenly pride — the womanly sense 
of dignity, even when most in excess, and expressed in the 
language of scorn — which tortures a man and lacerates his 
heart, at the same time that it pierces him with admiration. 

" Oh, what a world of scorn looks beautiful 
In the repelling glances of her eye! " 

And she who spares a man the agitations of this thraldom, 
robs him no less of its divinest transports. Wordsworth, how- 
ever, who never could have laid aside his own nature suffi- 
ciently to have played his part in such an impassioned court- 
ship, by suiting himself to this high sexual pride with the 
humility of a lover — and, perhaps, quite as little have enjoyed 
the spectacle of such a pride, or have viewed it in any degree 
as an attraction — it would to him have been a pure vexation. 
Looking down even upon the lady of his heart, as upon the 
rest of the world, from the eminence of his own intellectual 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 427 

superiority — viewing her, in fact, as a child — he would be 
much more disposed to regard any airs of feminine disdain 
she might assume, as the impertinence of girlish levity, than as 
the caprice of womanly pride. He would not, indeed, like 
Petruchio, have hinted a possibility that he might be provoked 
to box her ears — for any mode of unmanly roughness would 
have seemed abominable to his nature, with the meanest of 
her sex; but much I fear that, in any case of dispute, he would 
have called even his mistress, " Child! child!" and perhaps even 
(but this I do not say with the same certainty) might have bid 
her hold her tongue. Think of that, reader, with such lovers 
as I am placing in ideal contrast with these ! — image to your- 
self the haughty beauty, and the majestic wrath, never to be 
propitiated after hearing such irreverent language — nay, worse 
than irreverent language — language implying disenchant- 
ment! Yet still, it may be said, can a man forget — absolutely 
and in all moments forget — his intellectual superiority? You 
yourself, for example, who write these sketches, did it follow 
of necessity that the woman you loved should be equal (or 
seem equal in your own eyes) to yourself in intellect? No; 
far from it. I could not, perhaps, have loved, with a perfect 
love, any woman whom I had felt to be my own equal intel- 
lectually; but then I never' thought of her in that light, or 
under that relation. When the golden gate was opened, when 
the gate moved upon its golden hinges that opened to me 
the paradise of her society — when her young, melodious 
laughter sounded in my too agitated ear — did I think of any 
claims that I could have? Too happy, if I might be permit- 
ted to lay all things at her feet, all things that I could call my 
own, or ever hope to do so — yes, though it had been pos- 
sible that by power divine I should possess the earth, and 
the inheritance of the earth, — 

" The sea, and all which they contain." 

What was intellect, what was power, what was empire, if I 
had happened to possess them all in excess? These things 
were not of the nature of, had no common nature with, did 
not resemble, were no approximation to, the sweet angelic 
power — power infinite, power deathless, power unutterable, 
which formed her virgin dowry. O heart, why art thou dis- 
quieted? Tempestuous, rebellious, heart! oh, wherefore art 
thou still dreaming of things so long gone by, of expectations 
that could not be fulfilled, that, being mortal, must, in some 
point, have a mortal taint? Empty, empty thoughts! vanity 



428 DE QUINCE Y 

of vanities! Yet no; not always; for sometimes, after days of 
intellectual toil, when half the whole world is dreaming — I 
wrap my head in the bed-clothes, which hide even the faintest 
murmurs yet lingering from the fretful day — 

" The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day; " 

and then, through blinding tears, I see again that golden gate; 
again I stand waiting at the entrance; until dreams come that 
carry me once more to the Paradise beyond. 

If, however, no lover, in a proper sense — though from 
many exquisite passages one might conceive that at some time 
of his life he was, as especially from the inimitable stanzas 
beginning — 

" When she I loved was strong and gay. 
And like a rose in June; " 

or perhaps (but less powerfully so, because here the passion, 
though profound, is less the peculiar passion of love) from 
the impassioned lamentation for " the pretty Barbara," begin- 
ning— 

" 'Tis said that some have died for love: 
And here and there, amidst unhallowed ground 
In the cold north," etc., etc.: — 

yet, if no lover, or (which some of us have sometimes thought) 
a lover disappointed at some earlier period, by the death of 
her he loved, or by some other fatal event, (for he always 
preserved a mysterious silence on the subject of that " Lucy," 
repeatedly alluded to or apostrophized in his poems, and I 
have heard, from gossiping people about Hawkshead, some 
snatches of tragical story, which, after all, might be an idle 
semi-fable, improved out of slight materials) — let this matter 
have been as it might — at all events he made, what for him 
turns out, a happy marriage. Few people have lived on such 
terms of entire harmony and affection as he has lived with 
the woman of his final choice. Indeed, the sweetness, almost 
unexampled, of temper, which, in her early and middle years, 
shed so sunny a radiance over Mrs. Wordsworth's manners, 
sustained by the happy life she led, the purity of her con- 
science, and the uniformity of her good health, made it impos- 
sible for anybody to have quarrelled with her; and whatever 
fits of ill temper Wordsworth might have — for, with all his 
philosophy, he had such fits, though rarely — met with no fuel 
to support them, except in the more irritable temperament of 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 429 

his sister. She was all fire, and an ardour, which, like that of 
the first Lord Shaftesbury, 

. " O'er-informed its tenement of clay; " 

and, as this ardour looked out in every gleam of her wild eyes, 
(those " wild eyes " so finely noticed in the " Tintern Abbey,") 
as it spoke in every word of her self-baffled utterance, as it 
gave a trembling movement to her very person and demeanour 
— easily enough it might happen, that any apprehension of 
an unkind word should with her kindle a dispute. It might 
have happened; and yet, to the great honour of both, having 
such impassioned temperaments, rarely it did happen — and 
this was the more remarkable, as I have been assured that both 
were, in childhood, irritable, or even ill-tempered; and they 
were constantly together; for Miss Wordsworth was always 
ready to walk out — wet or dry, storm or sunshine, night or 
day; whilst Mrs. Wordsworth was completely dedicated to her 
maternal duties, and rarely left the house, unless when the 
weather was tolerable, or, at least, only for short rambles. I 
should not have noticed this trait in Wordsworth's occasional 
manners, had it been gathered from domestic or confidential 
opportunities. But, on the contrary, the first two occasions 
on which, after months' domestic intercourse with Words- 
worth, I first became aware of his possible ill-humour and peev- 
ishness, were so public, that others, and those strangers, must 
have been equally made aware of the scene. 

Having brought down the history of Wordsworth to the 
time of his marriage, I am reminded by that event to mention 
the singular good fortune, in all points of worldly prosperity, 
which has accompanied him through life. His marriage — 
the capital event of life — was fortunate ; so were all the minor 
occasions of a prosperous life. He has himself described, in 
his "Leech Gatherer," the fears that, at one time, or at least 
in some occasional moments of his life, haunted him, lest at 
some period or other he might be reserved for poverty. " Cold, 
pain, and hunger, and all fleshly ills," occurred to his boding 
apprehension — 

" And mighty poets in their misery dead." 
" He thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy. 
The sleepless soul that perished in its pride; 
Of him who walked in glory and in joy, 
Beside his plough upon the mountain-side." 

And, at starting on his career of life, certainly no man had 
plainer reasons for anticipating the worst evils that have ever 



430 DE QUINCEY 

persecuted poets, excepting only two reasons which might 
warrant him in hoping better; and these two were — his great 
prudence, and the temperance of his daily life. He could not 
be betrayed into foolish engagements; he could not be betrayed 
into expensive habits. Profusion and extravagance had no 
hold over him, by any one passion or taste. He was not lux- 
urious in anything; was not vain or even careful of external 
appearances — (not at least since he had left Cambridge, and 
visited a mighty nation in civil convulsions;) was not, even 
in the article of books, expensive. Very few books sufficed 
him; he was careless habitually of all the current literature, or 
indeed of any literature that could not be considered as enshrin- 
ing the very ideal, capital, and elementary, grandeur of the 
human intellect. It will be seen, further on, that in this 
extreme limitation of his literary sensibilities, he was as much 
assisted by that accident of his own intellectual condition, 
which the Germans of our day have so usefully brought for- 
ward to the consciousness, and by which so many anomalies 
of opinions are solved — viz. his extreme, intense, unparalleled 
onesidedness, (einseitigkeit,) as by any peculiar sanity of feel- 
ing. Thousands of books, that have given the most genuine 
and even rapturous delight to millions of ingenuous minds, 
for Wordsworth were absolutely a dead letter — closed and 
sealed up from his sensibilities and his powers of appreciation, 
not less than colours from a blind man's eye. Even the few 
books which his peculiar mind had made indispensable to him, 
were not so in the degree which they would have been to a 
man of more sedentary habits. He lived in the open air; and 
the enormity of pleasure which both he and his sister drew 
from the common appearances of Nature and their everlasting 
variety — variety so infinite, that if no one leaf of a tree, or 
shrub, according to Leibnitz's principle, ever exactly resem- 
bled another in all its filaments, and their arrangement, still 
less did any one day ever repeat another in all its pleasurable 
elements — this pleasure was to him, in the stead of many 
libraries — 

" One impulse from a vernal wood, 
Could teach him more of Man, 

Of moral evil, and of good, 
Than all the sages can." 

And he, we may be sure, who could draw 

" even from the meanest flower that blows, 



Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears; " 
to whom the mere daisy, the pansy, the primrose, could fur- 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 431 

nish pleasures — not the puerile ones which his most puerile 
and worldly insulters imagined, but pleasures drawn from 
depths of reverie and meditative tenderness far beyond all 
power of their hearts to conceive : — that man would hardly 
need any large variety of books. In fact, there were only 
two provinces of literature in which Wordsworth could be 
looked upon as well read — Poetry and Ancient History. Nor 
do I believe that he would much have lamented, on his own 
account, if all books had perished, excepting the entire body 
of English poetry, and, perhaps, " Plutarch's Lives." ^ 

With tliese simple or rather austere tastes, Wordsworth (it 
might seem) had little reason to fear poverty — certainly not 
with any moderate income ; but meantime he had none. About 
the time when he left college, I have good grounds for believ- 
ing that his whole regular income was precisely = o. Some 
fragments must have survived from the funds devoted to his 
education ; and with these, no doubt, he supported the expenses 
of his continental tours, and his year's residence in France. 
But, at length, cold, pain, and hunger, and "all fleshly ills," 
must have stared him in the face pretty earnestly. And hope 
of longer evading an unpleasant destiny of daily toil in some 
form or other there seemed absolutely none. 

" For," as he himself expostulates with himself — 

" For how can he expect that others should 
Sow for him, build for him, and, at his call, 
Love him, who for himself will take no thought at all?" 

In this dilemma he had all but resolved, as Miss Wordsworth 
once told me, to take pupils; and perhaps that, though odious 
enough, was the sole resource he had; for, with all his immeas- 
urable genius, Wordsworth has not, even yet, and from long 
experience, acquired any popular talent of writing for the cur- 
rent press; and, at that period of his life, he was gloomily 
unfitted for bending to such a yoke. In this crisis of his fate, 
possibly it might be — a fact which a mere accident once 
caused Miss Wordsworth to mention to me, in a whispering 
tone, and (as if ashamed of it) she never recurred to it — that 
Wordsworth, for once, and once only, became a martyr to 
some nervous afifection. That raised pity; but I could not 
forbear smiling at the remedy, or palliation, which his few 
friends adopted. Every night they played at cards with him, 
as the best mode of beguiling his sense of distress, whatever 
it might be; cards, which, in any part of the thirty-and-one 
years since I have known Wordsworth, could have had as 



432 DE QUINCEY 

little power to interest him, or to cheat him of sorrow, as 
marbles or a kite — (Scotice, a dragon!) However, so it was; 
for my information could not be questioned : it came from Miss 
Wordsworth. 

The crisis, as I have said, had arrived for determining the 
future colour of his life. Memorable it is, that exactly in those 
critical moments when some decisive step had first become 
necessary, there happened the first instance of Wordsworth's 
good luck; and equally memorable that, at measured intervals, 
throughout the long sequel of his life since then, a regular 
succession of similar but superior God-sends have fallen in, 
to sustain his expenditure, duly as it grew with the growing 
claims upon his purse. A more fortunate man, I believe, does 
not exist than Wordsworth. The aid which now dropped 
from heaven, as it were, to enable him to range at will in paths 
of his own choosing, and 

" Finally array 
His temples with the muses' diadem," 

came in the shape of a bequest from Raisley Calvert, a young 
man of good family in Cumberland, who died about this time 
of pulmonary consumption. A very remarkable young man 
he must have been, this Raisley Calvert, to have discerned, at 
this early period, that future superiority in Wordsworth which 
so few people suspected. He was the brother of a Cumber- 
land gentleman, whom I have seen; a generous man, doubt- 
less; for he made no sort of objections (though legally, I have 
heard, he might) to his brother's farewell memorial of regard; 
a good man to all his dependents, as I have generally under- 
stood, in the neighbourhood of Windy Brow, his mansion, near 
Keswick; and, as Southey always said, (who must know better 
than I could do,) a man of strong natural endowments; else, 
as his talk was of oxen, I might have made the mistake of 
supposing him to be, in heart and soul, what he was in pro- 
fession — a mere farming country gentleman, whose ambition 
was chiefly planted upon turning up mighty turnips. The 
sum left by Raisley Calvert was £900; and it was laid out in 
an annuity. This was the basis of Wordsworth's prosperity in 
life; and upon this he has built up, by a series of accessions, 
in which each step, taken separately for itself, seems perfectly 
natural, whilst the total result has undoubtedly something won- 
derful about it, the present goodly edifice of his fortunes. Next 
in the series, came the present Lord Lonsdale's repayment of 
his predecessor's debt. Upon that, probably, it was that 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 433 

Wordsworth felt himself entitled to marry. Then, I believe, 
came some fortune with Miss Hutchinson; then — that is, 
fourthly — some worthy uncle of the same lady was pleased 
to betake himself to a better world, leaving to various nieces, 
and especially to Mrs. Wordsworth, something or other — I 
forget what, but it was expressed by thousands of pounds. 
At this moment, Wordsworth's family had begun to increase; 
and the worthy old uncle, like everybody else in Wordsworth's 
case, (I wish I could say the same in my own,) finding his 
property very clearly " wanted," and, as people would tell him, 
" bespoke," felt how very indelicate it vv^ould look for him to 
stay any longer; and so oflf he moved. But Wordsworth's 
family, and the wants of that family, still continued to increase ; 
and the next person — viz. the fifth — who stood in the way, 
and must, therefore, have considered himself rapidly growing 
into a nuisance, was the Stamp-Distributor for the county of 
Westmoreland. About March, 1814, I think it was, that his 
very comfortable situation was wanted. Probably it took a 
month for the news to reach him; because in April, and not 
before, feeling that he had received a proper notice to quit, 
he, good man, this stamp-distributor, like all the rest, distrib- 
uted himself and his office into two different places — the latter 
falling, of course, into the hands of Wordsworth. 

This office, which it was Wordsworth's pleasure to speak of 
as " a little one," yielded, I believe, somewhere about £500 a 
year. Gradually, even that, with all former sources of income, 
became insufficient, which ought not to surprise anybody; for 
a son at Oxford, as a gentleman commoner, would spend, at 
the least, £300 per annum; and there were other children. 
Still it is wrong to say that it had become insufficient; as usual, 
it had not come to that ; but, on the first symptoms arising that 
it would soon come to that, somebody, of course, had notice 
to consider himself a sort of nuisance elect — in this case, it 
was the distributor of stamps for the county of Cumberland. 
His district was absurdly large ; and what so reasonable as that 
he should submit to a PoHsh partition of his profits — no, not 
Polish; for, on reflection, such a partition neither was nor 
could be attempted with regard to an actual incumbent. But 
then, since people had such consideration for him as not to 
remodel the office so long as he lived, on the other hand, the 
least he could do for " people " in return, so as to show his 
sense of this consideration, was not to trespass on so much 
goodness longer than necessary. Accordingly, here, as in all 
cases before, the Deus ex machina who invariably interfered 
28 



434 ^E QUINCEY 

when any nodus arose in Wordsworth's affairs, such as could 
be considered vindice dignus, caused the distributor to begone 
into a region where no stamps are wanted, about the very 
month, or so, when an additional £400 per annum became desir- 
able. This, or perhaps more, was understood to have been 
added by the new arrangement, to the Westmoreland distrib- 
utorship: the small towns of Keswick and Cockermouth, 
together with the important one of Whitehaven, being 
severed, under this regulation, from their old dependency, or 
Cumberland, (to which geographically they belonged,) and 
transferred to the small territory of rocky Westmoreland, the 
sum total of whose inhabitants was, at that time, not much 
above 50,000; of which number, one third, or nearly so, might 
be collected into the only important town of Kendal; but, of 
the other two thirds, a larger proportion was a simple agri- 
cultural or pastoral population, than anywhere else in Eng- 
land. In Westmoreland, therefore, it may be supposed that 
the stamp demand could not have been so great, not, perhaps, 
by three quarters, as in Cumberland; which, besides having a 
population of 160,000, had more and larger towns. The result 
of this new distribution, was something that approached to 
an equalization of the districts — giving to each, as was said 
in round terms, a thousand a year; but, in more accurate terms, 
perhaps £900. 

Thus I have traced Wordsworth's ascent through its sev- 
eral steps and stages, to what, for his moderate desires and 
habits so philosophic, may be fairly considered opulence. And 
it must rejoice every man, who joins in the public homage 
now rendered to his powers, (and what man is to be found that 
more or less does not?) to hear, with respect to one so lavishly 
endowed by nature, that he has not been neglected by fortune; 
that he has never had the finer edge of his sensibilities dulled 
by the sad anxieties, the degrading fears, the miserable depend- 
encies of debt; that he has been blessed with competency even 
when poorest; has had hope and cheerful prospects in rever- 
sion, through every stage of his life; that at all times he has 
been liberated from reasonable anxieties about the final interests 
of his children; that at all times he has been blessed with 
leisure, the very amplest that ever man enjoyed, for intellectual 
pursuits the most delightful; yes, that even for those delicate 
and coy pursuits, he has possessed, in combination, all the 
conditions for their most perfect culture — the leisure, the ease, 
the solitude, the society, the domestic peace, the local scenery 
— Paradise for his eye, in Miltonic beauty, lying outside his 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 435 

windows, Paradise for his heart, in the perpetual happiness 
of his own fireside; and, finally, when increasing years might 
be supposed to demand something more of modern luxuries, 
and expanding intercourse with society in its most polished 
forms, something more of refined elegances, that his means, 
still keeping pace, in almost arithmetical ratio, with his wants, 
had shed the graces of art upon the failing powers of nature, 
had stripped infirmity of discomfort, and (so far as the neces- 
sities of things will allow) had placed the final stages of life, 
by means of many compensations, by universal praise, by 
plaudits reverberated from senates, benedictions wherever his 
poems have penetrated, honour, troops of friends — in short, 
by all that miraculous prosperity can do to evade the primal 
decrees of nature — had placed the final stages upon a level 
with the first. This report of Wordsworth's success in Hfe 
will rejoice thousands of hearts. And a good nature will sym- 
pathize with that joy, will exult in that exultation, no matter 
for any private grievances, and with a non obstante to any 
wrong, however stinging, which it may suppose itself to have 
suflfered. Yet, William Wordsworth, nevertheless, if you ever 
allowed yourself to forget the human tenure of these mighty 
blessings — if, though wearing your honours justly — most 
justly, as respects A. and B., this man and that man — you 
have forgotten that no man can challenge such trophies by 
any absolute or meritorious title, as respects the dark powers 
which give and take away — if, in the blind spirit of presump- 
tion, you have insulted the less prosperous fortunes of a 
brother, frail, indeed, but not dishonourably frail, and in his 
very frailty — that is, in his failing exertions — and for the 
deficient measure of his energies, (doubtless too much below 
the standard of reasonable expectations,) able to plead that 
which you never cared to ask — then, if (instead of being sixty- 
eight years old) you were ^, I should warn you to listen for 
the steps of Nemesis approaching from afar; and, were it only 
in relation to your own extremity of good fortune, I would 
say, in the case of your being a young man, lavish as she may 
have been hitherto, and for years to come may still be — 

" Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure! 
Her audit, though delay'd, answered must be. 
And her quietus is to render thee." ^ 

But now, reverting to the subject of Wordsworth's pros- 
perity, I have numbered up six separate stages of good luck — 
six instances of pecuniary showers emptying themselves into 



436 DE QUINCEY 

his very bosom, at the very moments when they began to 
be needed, on the first symptoms that they might be wanted — 
accesses of fortune stationed, upon his road, Hke repeating 
frigates, connecting, to all appearances some preconcerted line 
of operations; and, amidst the tumults of chance, wearing as 
much the air of purpose and design, as if they supported a 
human plan — so much the more, also, to a thoughtful observer, 
as the subject of this overflowing favour from the blind god- 
dess, happened, by the rarest of accidents, to be that man 
whom many of us would have declared the most worthy of 
that favour, most of us, perhaps, as in the case of Themistocles, 
would have declared, at the very least, second best. I have 
come down to the sixth case. Whether there were any 
seventh, I do not know: but confident I feel, that, had a seventh 
been required by circumstances, a seventh would have hap- 
pened. At the same time, every reader will, of course, under- 
stand me to mean, that not only was it utterly out of the power 
or will of Wordsworth to exert any, the very slightest influ- 
ence upon these cases, not only was this impossible — not only 
was it impossible to the moral nature of Wordsworth, that he 
should even express that sort of interest in the event, which 
is sometimes intimated to the incumbents of a place or church- 
living by sudden inquiries after their health from eager expect- 
ants — but also, in every one of the instances recorded, he 
could have had not the slightest knowledge beforehand of 
any interest at issue for himself. This explanation I make 
to forestall the merest possibility of misapprehension. And 
yet, for all that, so true it is, that still, as Wordsworth needed 
a place or a fortune, the holder of that place or fortune was 
immediately served with a summons to surrender it — so cer- 
tainly was this impressed upon my belief, as one of the blind 
necessities, making up the prosperity and fixed destiny of 
Wordsworth, that, for myself — had I happened to know of 
any peculiar adaptation in an estate or office of mine, to an 
existing need of Wordsworth's — forthwith, and with the speed 
of a man running for his life, I would have laid it down at 
his feet. " Take it," I would have said — " take it — or in three 
weeks I shall be a dead man." 

Well — let me pause: I think the reader is likely, by this 
time, to have a slight notion of my notion of Wordsworth's 
inevitable prosperity — and the sort of lien that he had upon 
the incomes of other men who happened to stand in his way. 
The same prosperity attended the other branches of the family, 
with the single exception of John, the brother who perished 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 437 

in the Abergavenny: and even he was prosperous up to the 
moment of his fatal accident. As to Miss Wordsworth, who 
will, by some people, be classed amongst the non-prosperous, 
I rank her amongst the most fortunate of women; or, at least, 
if regard be had to that period of life which is most capable 
of happiness. Her fortune, after its repayment by Lord Lons- 
dale, was, much of it, confided with a sisterly affection, to the 
use of her brother John; and most of it perished in his ship. 
How much I never felt myself entitled to ask; but certainly a 
part was on that occasion lost irretrievably. Either it was that 
only a partial insurance had been effected, or else the nature 
of the accident, being in home waters, (ofif the coast of Dorset- 
shire,) might, by the nature of the contract, have taken the 
case out of the benefit of the policy. The loss, however, had 
it even been total, for a single sister amongst a family of 
flourishing brothers, could not be of any lasting importance. 
A much larger number of voices would proclaim her to have 
been unfortunate in life, because she made no marriage con- 
nection; and certainly the insipid as well as unfeeling ridicule 
which descends so plentifully from vulgar minds, upon those 
women who, perhaps from strength of character, have refused 
to make such a connection where it promised little of elevated 
happiness, does make the state of singleness somewhat of a 
trial to the patience of many; and to many the cruelty of this 
trial has proved a snare for beguiling them of their honourable 
resolutions. Doubtless the most elevated form, and the most 
impassioned, of human happiness, cannot be had out of mar- 
riage. But, as the opportunities are rare in which all the con- 
ditions concur for such connections, how important it is that 
the dignity of noble-minded (and, in the lowest case, of firm- 
minded) women, should be upheld by society in the honourable 
election they make of a self-dependent state of virgin seclusion, 
by preference to a heartless marriage! Such women, as Mrs. 
Trollope justly remarks, fill a place in society which, in their 
default, could not be supplied, and are disposable for duties 
requiring a tenderness and a punctuality that could not be 
hoped from women pre-occupied with household or maternal 
claims. In another point, Mrs. Trollope is right: few women 
live unmarried from necessity — few indeed. Miss Words- 
worth, to my knowledge, had several offers — amongst them, 
one from Hazlitt; all, without a moment's hesitation, she 
rejected decisively. And she did right. A happier life, by far, 
was hers in youth, coming as near as difference of scenery and 
difference of relations would permit, to that which was prom- 



438 DE QUINCEY 

ised to Ruth — the Ruth of her brother's' creation — by the 
youth who came from Georgia's shore; for, though not upon 
American savannas, or Canadian Lakes — 

" With all their fairy crowds 
Of islands, that together lie 
As quietly as spots of sky 

Amongst the evening clouds " — 

yet, amongst the loveliest scenes of sylvan England, and (at 
intervals) of sylvan Germany — amongst lakes, too, far better 
fitted to give the sense of their own character than the inland 
seas of America, and amongst mountains as romantic and 
loftier than many of the chief ranges in that country — her 
time fleeted away like some golden age, or like the life of 
primeval man ; and she, like Ruth, was for years allowed 

" To run, though not a bride, 

A sylvan huntress, by the side " 

of him to whom, like Ruth, she had dedicated her days; and 
to whose children, afterwards, she dedicated a love like that 
of mothers. Dear Miss Wordsworth! How noble a creature 
did she seem when I first knew her, — and when, on the very 
first night which I passed in her brother's company, he read 
to me, in illustration of something he was saying, a passage 
from Fairfax's " Tasso," ending pretty nearly with these 
words — 

" Amidst the broad fields and the endless wood 

The lofty lady kept her maidenhood " — 

I thought that, possibly, he had his sister in his thoughts. 
Yet, " lofty " was hardly the right word. Miss Wordsworth 
was too ardent and fiery a creature to maintain the reserve 
essential to dignity ; and dignity was the last thing one thought 
of in the presence of one so artless, so fervent in her feelings, 
and so embarrassed in their utterance — sometimes, also, in 
the attempt to check them. It must not, however, be sup- 
posed that there was any silliness or weakness of enthusiasm 
about her. She was under the continual restraint of severe 
good sense, though liberated from that false shame which, in 
so many persons, accompanies all expressions of natural emo- 
tion; and she had too long enjoyed the ennobling conversation 
of her brother, and his admirable comments on the daily read- 
ing which they pursued in common, to fail in any essential 
point of logic or propriety of thought. Accordingly, her let- 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 439 

ters, though the most careless and unelaborate — nay, the most 
hurried that can be imagined — are models of good sense and 
just feeling. In short, beyond any person I have known m 
this world. Miss Wordsworth was the creature of impulse; 
but, as a woman most thoroughly virtuous and well-principled, 
as one who could not fail to be kept right by her own excellent 
heart, and as an intellectual creature from her cradle, with 
much of her illustrious brother's peculiarity of mind — finally, 
as one who had been, in efifect, educated and trained by that 
very brother — she won the sympathy and the respectful regard 
of every man worthy to approach her. All of us loved her — 
by which us I mean especially Professor Wilson and myself, 
together with such Oxford or Cambridge men, or men from 
Scotland, as either of us or as others introduced to her society. 
And many a time, when the Professor and myself — travelling 
together in solitary places, sleeping in the same bedroom, or 
(according to accidents of wayfaring life) in the same bed — 
have fallen into the most confidential interchange of opinions 
upon a family in which we had both so common and so pro- 
found an interest, whatever matter of anger or complaint we 
might find or fancy in others. Miss Wordsworth's was a name 
privileged from censure; or, if a smile were bestowed upon 
some eccentricity or innocent foible, it was with the tender- 
ness that we should have shown to a sister. Properly, and in 
a spirit of prophecy, was she named Dorothy; for, as that- 
name apparently predestines her who bears it to figure rather 
in the character of aunt than of mother, (insomuch, that I 
have rarely happened to hear this name, except, indeed, in 
Germany, without the prefix of aunt,) so, also, in its Greek 
meaning,' gift of God, well did this name prefigure the rela- 
tion in which she stood to Wordsworth, the mission with which 
she was charged — to wait upon him as the tenderest and 
most faithful of domestics; to love him as a sister; to sympa- 
thize with him as a confidante; to counsel him as one gifted 
with a power of judging that stretched as far as his own for 
producing; to cheer him and sustain him by the natural expres- 
sion of her feelings— so quick, so ardent, so unafifected — 
upon the probable effect of whatever thoughts, plans, images 
he might conceive; finally, and above all other ministrations, 
to ingraft, by her sexual sense of beauty, upon his masculine 
austerity that delicacy and those graces, which else (according 
to the grateful acknowledgments of his own maturest retro- 
spect) it would not have had. 



440 DE QUINCEY 

" The blessing of my later years 

Was with me when I was a boy: 
She gave me hopes, she gave me fears, 
A heart the fountain of sweet tears. 

And love, and thought, and joy." 

And elsewhere he describes her, in a philosophic poem, still in 
manuscript, as one who planted flowers and blossoms with her 
feminine hand upon what might else have been an arid rock — 
massy, indeed, and grand, but repulsive from the severity of its 
features. I may sum up in one brief abstract the sum total 
of Miss Wordsworth's character, as a companion, by saying, 
that she was the very wildest (in the sense of the most natural) 
person I have ever known ; and also the truest, most inevitable, 
and, at the same time, the quickest and readiest in her sympa- 
thy with either joy or sorrow, with laughter or with tears, 
with the realities of life or the larger realities of the poets! 

Meantime, amidst all this fascinating furniture of her mind, 
won from nature, from solitude, from enlightened companion- 
ship. Miss Wordsworth was as thoroughly deficient (some 
would say painfully deficient, I say charmingly deficient) in 
ordinary female accomplishments, as "Cousin Mary," in Miss 
Mitford's delightful sketch. French, she might have barely 
enough to read a plain modern page of narrative; Italian, I 
question whether any; German, just enough to insult the Ger- 
man literati, by showing how little she had found them or 
their writings necessary to her heart. The " Luise " of Voss, 
the " Hermann and Dorothea '^ of Goethe, she had begun to 
translate, as young ladies do "Telemaque;" but, like them, had 
chiefly cultivated the first two pages ;^ with the third, she had 
a slender acquaintance, and with the fourth, she meditated an 
intimacy at some future day. Music, in her solitary and out- 
of-doors life, she could have little reason for cultivating; nor 
is it possible that any woman can draw the enormous energy 
requisite for this attainment upon a modern scale of perfection, 
out of any other principle, than that of vanity (at least of great 
value for social applause) or of deep musical sensibility; neither 
of which belonged to Miss Wordsworth's constitution of mind. 
But, as everybody agrees in our days to think this accomplish- 
ment of no value whatever, and, in fact, unproduceable, unless 
in an exquisite state of culture, no complaint could be made 
on that score, nor any surprise felt. But the case in which 
the irregularity of Miss Wordsworth's education did astonish 
one, was in that part which respected her literary knowledge. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 44 1 

In whatever she read, or neglected to read, she had obeyed 
the single impulse of her own heart; where that led her, there 
she followed; where that was mute or indifferent, not a thought 
had she to bestow upon a writer's high reputation, or the call 
for some acquaintance with his works, to meet the demands 
of society. And thus the strange anomaly arose, of a woman 
deeply acquainted with some great authors, whose works lie 
pretty much out of the fashionable beat; able, moreover, in her 
own person, to produce brilliant effects; able, on some sub- 
jects, to write delightfully, and with the impress of originality 
upon all she uttered — and yet ignorant of great classical works 
in her own mother tongue, and careless of literary history, 
unless, where it touched upon seme topic of household interest, 
in a degree which at once exiled her from the rank and privi- 
leges of blue-stockingism. 

The reader may perhaps have objected silently to the illus- 
tration drawn from Miss Mitford, that '' Cousin Mary " does 
not effect her fascinations out of pure negations. Such nega- 
tions, from the mere startling effect of their oddity in this 
present age, might fall in with the general current of her attrac- 
tions; but Cousin Mary's undoubtedly lay in the positive 
witcheries of a manner and a character, transcending, by force 
of irresistible nature, (as in a similar case recorded by Words- 
worth in '' The Excursion,") all the pomp of nature and art 
united, as seen in ordinary creatures. Now, in Miss Words- 
worth, there were certainly no " Cousin Mary " fascinations of 
manner and deportment, that snatch a grace beyond the reach 
of art; there she was indeed painfully deficient; for hurry mars 
and defeats even the most ordinary expression of the feminine 
character, its gentleness: abruptness and trepidation leave 
often a joint impression of what seems for an instant both 
rudeness and ungracefulness : and the least painful impression 
was that of unsexual awkwardness; — but the point in which 
Miss Wordsworth made the most ample amends for all that 
she wanted of more customary accomplishments, was, this 
very originality and native freshness of intellect, which settled 
with so bewitching an effect upon some of her writings, and 
upon many a sudden remark or ejaculation, extorted by some- 
thing or other that struck her eye, in the clouds, or in colouring, 
or in accidents of light and shade, of form, or combination of 
form. To talk of her " writings," is too pompous an expres- 
sion, or at least far beyond any pretensions that she ever made 
for herself. Of poetry she has written little indeed; and that 
little not, in my opinion, of much merit. The verses published 



442 DE QUINCEY 

by her brother, and beginning — " Which way does the wind 
come?" meant only as nursery Hnes, are certainly wild and 
pretty; but the other specimen is likely to strike most readers 
as feeble and trivial in the sentiment. Meantime, the book 
which is in very deed a monument to her power of catching 
and expressing all the hidden beauties of natural scenery, with 
a felicity of diction, a truth and strength, that far transcend 
Gilpin, or professional writers on those subjects, is her record 
of a tour in Scotland, made about the year 1802. This book, 
unless my recollection of it, from a period now gone by for 
thirty years, has deceived me, is absolutely unique in its class: 
and, though it never could be very popular, from the minute- 
ness of its details, and the luxuriation of the descriptions, yet 
I believe no person has ever been favoured with a sight of it, 
that has not regretted that it is not published. Its own extra- 
ordinary merit, apart from the interest which now invests the 
name of Wordsworth, could not fail to procure purchasers 
for one edition, on its first appearance. 

Coleridge was of the party at first; but afterwards, under 
some attack of rheumatism, found or thought it necessary to 
leave them. Melancholy it would be at this time, thirty-six 
years and more from the era of that tour, to read it under the 
afflicting remembrances of all which has been suffered in the 
interval by two at least out of the three who composed the 
travelling party; for I fear that Miss Wordsworth has suffered 
not much less than Coleridge: and, in any general expression 
of it, from the same causes — viz. an excess of pleasurable 
excitement and luxurious sensibility, sustained in youth by a 
constitutional glow from animal causes, but drooping as soon 
as that was withdrawn. It is painful to point a moral from 
any story connected with those whom one loves or has loved; 
painful to look for one moment towards any " improvement " 
of such a case, especially where there is no reason to tax the 
parties with any criminal contribution to their own sufferings, 
except through that relaxation of the will and its potential 
energies, through which most of us, at some time or other — 
I myself too deeply and sorrowfully — stand accountable to 
our own consciences. Not, therefore, with any more inten- 
tion of speaking in a monitorial or censorial character, than 
in passing, after dark, through Grasmere churchyard, and 
trespassing a little to the left, I could be supposed to have the 
intention of trampling upon the grave of one who lies buried 
near the pathway, and whom once I loved in extremity, do I 
here notice a defect in Miss Wordsworth's self-education of 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 443 

something that might have mitigated the sort of suffering 
which, more or less, ever since the period of her too genial, 
too radiant youth, I suppose her to have struggled with. I 
have mentioned the narrow basis on which her literary inter- 
ests had been made to rest — the exclusive character of her 
reading, and the utter want of pretension, and of all that 
looks like blue-stockingism in the style of her habitual con- 
versation and mode of dealing with literature. Now, to me 
it appears, upon reflection, that it would have been far better 
had Miss Wordsworth condescended a little to the ordinary 
mode of pursuing literature; better for her own happiness if 
she had been a blue-stocking; or, at least, if she had been, in 
good earnest, a writer for the press, with the pleasant cares 
and solicitudes of one who has some little ventures, as it were, 
on that vast ocean. 

We all know with how womanly and serene a temper lit- 
erature has been pursued by Joanna Baillie, by Miss Mitford, 
and other women of admirable genius — with how absolutely 
no sacrifice or loss of feminine dignity they have cultivated 
the profession of authorship; and, if we could hear their report, 
I have no doubt that the little cares of correcting proofs, and 
the forward-looking solicitudes connected with the mere busi- 
ness arrangements of new publications, would be numbered 
amongst the minor pleasures of life; whilst the more elevated 
cares connected with the intellectual business of such projects, 
must inevitably have done much to solace the troubles, which 
as human beings, they cannot but have experienced; and even 
to scatter flowers upon their path. Mrs. Johnstone, of Edin- 
burgh, has pursued the profession of literature — the noblest 
of professions, and the only one open to both sexes alike — 
with even more assiduity, and as a daily occupation; and, I 
have every reason to believe with as much benefit to her own 
happiness, as to the instruction and amusement of her 
readers : — for the petty cares of authorship are agreeable, and 
its serious cares are ennobling. More especially is such an 
occupation useful to a woman without children, and without 
any prospective resources; resources in objects that involve 
hopes growing and unfulfilled. It is too much to expect of 
any woman (or man either) that her mind should support 
itself in a pleasurable activity, under the drooping energies 
of life, by resting on the past or on the present; some interest 
in reversion, some subject of hope from day to day, must be 
called in to reinforce the animal fountains of good spirits. 
Had that been opened for Miss Wordsworth, I am satisfied 



444 ^^ QUINCEY 

that she would have passed a more cheerful middle-age, and 
would not, at any period, have yielded to that nervous depres- 
sion which, I grieve to hear, has clouded her latter days. 
Nephews and nieces, whilst young and innocent, are as good 
almost as sons and daughters to a fervid and loving heart that 
has carried them in her arms from the hour they were bom. 
But, after a nephew has grown into a huge hulk of a man, six 
feet high, and as stout as a bullock ; after he has come to have 
children of his own, lives at a distance, and finds occasion to 
talk chiefly of oxen and turnips — no ofifence to him — he 
ceases to be an object of any very profound sentiment. There 
is nothing in such a subject to rouse the flagging pulses of the 
heart, and to sustain a fervid spirit, to whom, at the very best, 
human life offers little of an adequate or sufficing interest, 
unless when idealized by the magic of the mighty poets. 
Farewell, Miss Wordsworth! farewell, impassioned Dorothy! 
I have not seen you for many a day — shall never see you 
again perhaps ; but shall attend your steps with tender thoughts, 
so long as I hear of you living: so will Professor Wilson; and, 
from two hearts, at least, that loved and admired you in your 
fervid prime, it may sometimes cheer the gloom of your 
depression to be assured of never-failing remembrance full of 
love and respectful pity. 

Here ceases my record of the life and its main incidents, so 
far as they are known to me, of William Wordsworth; to 
which, on account of the important services which she has 
rendered him; on account of the separate interest which, apart 
from those services, belongs to her own mind and character; 
on account of the singular counterpart which in some features 
they offer to those of her brother, and, on account of the 
impressive coincidence and parallelism in this remarkable dedi- 
cation of Dorothy to William Wordsworth, with that of Mary 
to Charles Lamb — I have thought that it would be a proper 
complement of the whole record, to subjoin a very especial 
notice of his sister. Miss Wordsworth would have merited a 
separate notice in any biographical dictionary of our times, had 
there even been no William Wordsworth in existence. 

I have traced the history of each until the time when I 
became personally acquainted with them; and, henceforwards, 
anything which it may be interesting to know with respect to 
either, will naturally come forward, not in a separate narrative, 
but in connection with my own life; for, in the following year, 
I became myself the tenant of that pretty cottage in which I 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 445 

found them ; and from that time, for many years, my Hfe flowed 
on in daily union with theirs. 

Notes 

* I do not mean to insinuate that Wordsworth was at all in the 
dark about the inaccuracy and want of authentic weight attaching to 
Plutarch as an historian; but his business with Plutarch was not for 
purposes of research; he was satisfied with his fine moral effects. 

' Shakespeare's Sonnets. 

^ So I express it, because so much in the development of the story 
and situations necessarily belongs to the poet. Else, for the mere 
outline of the story, it was founded upon fact: Wordsworth himself 
told me, in general terms, that the case which suggested the poem 
was that of an American lady, whose husband forsook her at the very 
place of embarkation from England, under circumstances and under 
expectations upon her part, very much the same as those of Ruth. I 
am afraid, however, that the husband was an attorney. 

* Of course, therefore, it is essentially the same name as Theodora — 
the same elements being only differently arranged. Yet how opposite 
is the impression upon the mind! and chiefly, I suppose, from the too 
prominent effect of this name in the case of Justinian's scandalous 
wife. 

^ Viz. " Calpyso ne savoit se consoler du depart," etc. For how 
long a period, viz. nearly two centuries has Calypso been inconsolable 
in the morning studies of young ladies! As Fenelon's most dreary 
romance always opened at one or other of these three earliest and 
dreary pages, naturally to my sympathetic fancy the poor unhappy 
goddess seemed to be eternally aground on this Goodwin Sand of 
inconsolability. It is amongst the standing hypocrisies of the world, 
that most people affect a reverence for this book, which nobody reads. 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 



IN February, as I have said, of 1809, I quitted Allan 
Bank; and, from that time until the depth of summer, 
Miss Wordsworth was employed in the task she had 
volunteered, of renewing and furnishing the little cot- 
tage in which I was to succeed the illustrious tenant who had, 
in my mind, hallowed the rooms by a seven years' occupation, 
during perhaps, the happiest period of his life — the early 
years of his marriage, and of his first acquaintance with 
parental affections. Cottage, immortal in my remembrance! 
as well it might be; for this cottage I retained through just 
seven- and-twenty years: this was the scene of struggle the 
most tempestuous and bitter within my own mind: this the 
scene of my despondency and unhappiness: this the scene of 
my happiness — a happiness which justified the faith of man's 
earthly lot, as, upon the whole, a dowry from heaven. It was, 
in its exterior, not so much a picturesque cottage — for its 
outline and proportions, its windows and its chimneys, were 
not sufficiently marked and effective for the picturesque^ — 
as it was lovely: one gable end was, indeed, most gorgeously 
apparelled in ivy, and so far picturesque ; but the principal side, 
or what might be called front, as it presented itself to the road, 
and was most illuminated by windows, was embossed — nay, 
it might be said, smothered — in roses of different species, 
amongst which the moss and the damask prevailed. These, 
together with as much jessamine and honeysuckle as could 
find room to flourish, were not only in themselves a most inter- 
esting garniture for a humble cottage wall, but they also per- 
formed the acceptable ser\qce of breaking the unpleasant glare 
that would else have wounded the eye, from the whitewash; a 
glare which, having been renewed amongst the general prepa- 
rations against my coming to inhabit the house, could not be 
sufficiently subdued in tone for the artist's eye until the storms 
of several winters had weather-stained and tamed down its 
brilliancy. The Westmoreland cottages, as a class, have long 
been celebrated for their picturesque forms, and very justly so: 

446 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 447 

in no part of the world are cottages to be found more strik- 
ingly interesting to the eye by their general outlines, by the 
sheltered porches of their entrances, by their exquisite chim- 
neys, by their rustic windows, and by the distribution of the 
parts. These parts are on a larger scale, both as to number 
and size, than a stranger would expect to find as dependencies 
and out-houses attached to dwelling-houses so modest; chiefly 
from the necessity of making provision, both in fuel for them- 
selves, and in hay, straw, and brackens for the cattle against 
the long winter. But, in praising the Westmoreland dwellings, 
it must be understood that only those of the native Dalesmen 
are contemplated ; for as to those raised by the alien intruders 
— " the lakers," or " foreigners " as they are sometimes called 
by the old indigenous possessors of the soil — these being 
designed to exhibit " a taste " and an eye for the picturesque, 
are pretty often mere models of deformity, as vulgar and as 
silly as it is well possible for any object to be, in a case where, 
after all, the workman, and obedience to custom, and the 
necessities of the ground, etc., will often step in to compel 
the architects into common sense and propriety. The main 
defect in Scottish scenery, the eyesore that disfigures so many 
charming combinations of landscape, is the offensive style of 
the rural architecture; but still, even where it is worst, the 
mode of its offence is not by affectation and conceit, and pre- 
posterous attempts at realizing subHme, Gothic, or castellated 
effects in little ginger-bread ornaments, and " tobacco pipes," 
and make-believe parapets, and towers like kitchen or hot- 
house flues ; but in the hard undisguised pursuit of mere coarse 
uses and needs of life. 

Too often, the rustic mansion, that should speak of decent 
poverty and seclusion, peaceful and comfortable, wears the 
most repulsive air of town confinement and squalid indigence; 
the house being built of substantial stone, three stories high, 
or even four, the roof of massy slate; and everything strong 
which respects the future outlay of the proprietor — every- 
thing frail which respects the comfort of the inhabitants: win- 
dows broken and stuffed up with rags or old hats; steps and 
door encrusted with dirt; and the whole tarnished with smoke. 
Poverty — how different the face it wears looking with meagre 
staring eyes from such a city dwelling as this, and when it 
peeps out, with rosy cheeks, from amongst clustering roses 
and woodbines, at a little lattice, from a little one-story cottage ! 
Are, then, the main characteristics of the Westmoreland dwell- 
ing-houses imputable to superior taste? By no means. Spite 



448 DE QUINCEY 

of all that I have heard Mr. Wordsworth and others say in 
maintaining that opinion, I, for my part, do and must hold, 
that the Dalesmen produce none of the happy effects which 
frequently arise in their domestic architecture under any search 
after beautiful forms, a search which they despise with a sort 
of Vandal dignity; no, nor with any sense or consciousness of 
their success. How then? Is it accident — mere casual good 
luck — that has brought forth, for instance, so many exquisite 
forms of chimneys? Not so; but it is this: it is good sense, 
on the one hand, bending and conforming to the dictates or 
even the suggestions of the climate, and the local circumstances 
of rocks, water, currents of air, etc.; and, on the other hand, 
wealth sufficient to arm the builder with all suitable means for 
giving effect to his purpose, and to evade the necessity of 
make-shifts. But the radical ground of the interest attached 
to Westmoreland cottage architecture, lies in its submission 
to the determining agencies of the surrounding circumstances; 
such of them, I mean, as are permanent, and have been gath- 
ered from long experience. The porch, for instance, which 
does so much to take away from a house the character of a 
rude box, pierced with holes for air, light, and ingress, has 
evidently been dictated by the sudden rushes of wind through 
the mountain " ghylls," which make some kind of protection 
necessary to the ordinary door; and this reason has been 
strengthened in cases of houses near to a road, by the hos- 
pitable wish to provide a sheltered seat for the wayfarer; most 
of these porches being furnished with one in each of the two 
recesses, to the right and to the left. 

The long winter again, as I have already said, and the arti- 
ficial prolongation of the winter, by the necessity of keeping 
the sheep long upon the low grounds, creates a call for large 
out-houses; and these, for the sake of warmth, are usually 
placed at right angles to the house; whence the effect of mak- 
ing a much larger system of parts than would else arise. But 
perhaps the main feature, which gives character to the pile of 
building, is the roof, and, above all, the chimneys. It is the 
remark of an accomplished Edinburgh artist, H. W. Williams, 
in the course of his strictures upon the domestic architecture 
of the Italians, and especially of the Florentines, that the char- 
acter of buildings, in certain circumstances, "depends wholly 
or chiefly on the form of the roof and the chimney. This," he 
goes on, " is particularly the case in Italy, where more variety 
and taste is displayed in the chimneys than in the buildings to 
which they belong. These chimneys are as peculiar and char- 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 449 

acteristic as palm trees in a tropical climate." Again, in speak- 
ing of Calabria and the Ionian Islands, he says — " We were 
forcibly struck with the consequence which the beauty of the 
chimneys imparted to the character of the whole building." 
Now, in Great Britain, he complains, with reason, of the very 
opposite result; not the plain building ennobled by the chim- 
ney; but the chimney degrading the noble building; and in 
Edinburgh, especially, where the homely and inelegant appear- 
ance of the chimneys contrasts most disadvantageously and 
offensively with the beauty of the buildings which they sur- 
mount. Even here, however, he makes an exception for some 
of the old buildings, " whose chimneys," he admits, " are very 
tastefully decorated, and contribute essentially to the beauty of 
the general effect." It is probable, therefore, and many houses 
of the Elizabethan era confirm it, that a better taste prevailed, 
in this point, amongst our ancestors, both Scottish and Eng- 
lish; that this elder fashion travelled, together with many other 
usages, from the richer parts of Scotland to the Borders, and 
thence to the vales of Westmoreland; where they have con- 
tinued to prevail, from their affectionate adhesion to all patriar- 
chal customs. Some, undoubtedly, of these Westmoreland 
forms have been dictated by the necessities of the weather, and 
the systematic energies of human skill, from age to age, applied 
to the very difficult task of training smoke into obedience, under 
the peculiar difficulties presented by the sites of Westmoreland 
houses. These are chosen, generally speaking, with the same 
good sense and regard to domestic comfort, as the primary 
consideration (without, however, disdainfully slighting the 
sentiment, whatever it were, of peace, of seclusion, of gayety, 
of solemnity, the special " religio loci ") which seems to have 
guided the choice of those who founded reHgious houses. 

And here, again, by the way, appears a marked difference 
between the Dalesmen and the intrusive gentry — not credit- 
able to the latter. The native Dalesmen, well aware of the fuiy 
with which the wind often gathers and eddies about any emi- 
nence, however trifling its elevation, never thinks of planting 
his house there: whereas the stranger, singly solicitous about 
the prospect or the range of lake which his gilt saloons are to 
command, chooses his site too often upon points better fitted 
for a temple of yEolus than a human dwelling-place; and he 
belts his house with balconies and verandas that a mountain 
gale often tears away in mockery. The Dalesman, wherever 
his choice is not circumscribed, selects a sheltered spot, (a wray," 
for instance,) which protects him from the wind altogether, 
29 



450 DE QUINCEY 

Upon one or two quarters, and on all quarters from its tornado 
violence: he takes good care, at the same time, to be within a 
few feet of a mountain beck : a caution so little heeded by some 
of the villa founders, that absolutely, in a country surcharged 
with water they have sometime found themselves driven, by 
sheer necessity, to the after-thought of sinking a well. The 
very best situation, however, in other respects, may be bad in 
one; and sometimes find its very advantages, and the beetling 
crags which protect its rear, obstructions the most permanent 
to the ascent of smoke; and it is in the contest with these nat- 
ural baffling repellents of the smoke, and in the variety of arti- 
fices for modifying its vertical, or for accomplishing its lateral 
escape, that have arisen the large and graceful variety of chim- 
ney models. My cottage, wanting this primary feature of ele- 
gance in the constituents of Westmoreland cottage architecture, 
and wanting also another very interesting feature of the elder 
architecture, annually becoming more and more rare, viz. the 
outside gallery, (which is sometimes merely of wood, but is 
much more striking when provided for in the original con- 
struction of the house, and completely enfonce in the masonry,) 
could not rank high amongst the picturesque houses of the 
country ; those, at least, which are such by virtue of their archi- 
tectural form. It was, however, very irregular in its outline to 
the rear, by the aid of one little projecting room, and also of a 
stable and little barn, in immediate contact with the dwelling- 
house. It had, besides, the great advantage of a varying 
height : two sides being about fifteen or sixteen feet high from 
the exposure of both stories; whereas the other two being 
swathed about by a little orchard that rose rapidly and 
unequally towards the vast mountain range in the rear, exposed 
only the upper story; and, consequently, on those sides the 
elevation rarely rose beyond seven or eight feet. All these 
accidents of irregular form and outline, gave to the house some 
little pretensions to a picturesque character; whilst its "sep- 
arable accidents " (as the logicians say) — its bowery roses and 
jessamine clothed in its loveliness — its associations with Words- 
worth — crowned it, to my mind, with historical dignity; and, 
finally, my own twenty-seven years ofif-and-on connection with 
it, have, by ties personal and indestructible, endeared it to my 
heart so unspeakably beyond all other houses, that even now 
I rarely dream through four nights running, that I do not find 
myself (and others beside) in some one of those rooms; and, 
most probably, the last cloudy delirium of approaching death 
will re-install me in some chamber of that same humble cottage. 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 45 1 

" What a tale," says Foster, the eloquent essayist — " what a tale 
could be told by many a room, were the walls endowed with 
memory and speech ! " or, in the more impassioned expressions 
of Wordsworth — 

"Ah! what a lesson to a thoughtless man 

if any gladsome field of earth 

Could render back the sighs to which it hath responded. 
Or echo the sad steps by which it hath been trod! " 

And equally affecting it would be, if such a field or siich a 
house could render up the echoes of joy, of festal music, of 
jubilant laughter — the innocent mirth of infants, or the gayety, 
not less innocent, of youthful mothers — equally affecting 
would be such a reverberation of forgotten household happi- 
ness, with the re-echoing records of sighs and groans. And 
few indeed are the houses that, within a period no longer than 
from the beginning of the century to 1835 (so long was it 
either mine or Wordsworth's) have crowded^ such ample 
materials for those echoes, whether sorrowful or joyous. 

My cottage was ready in the summer; but I was playing 
truant amongst the valleys of Somersetshire; and, meantime, 
different families, throughout the summer, borrowed the cot- 
tage of the Wordsworths as my friends ; they consisted chiefly 
of ladies ; and some, by the delicacy of their attentions^ to the 
flowers, etc., gave me reason to consider their visit during my 
absence as a real honour; others — such is the difference of 
people in this world — left the rudest memorials of their care- 
less habits impressed upon house, furniture, garden, etc. In 
November, at last, I, the long-expected, made my appearance; 
some little sensation did really and naturally attend my coming, 
for most of the draperies belonging to beds, curtains, etc., had 
been sewed by the young women of that or the adjoining vales. 
This had caused me to be talked of. Many had seen ine on 
my visit to the Wordsworths. Miss Wordsworth had intro- 
duced the curious to a knowledge of my age, name, prospects, 
and all the rest of what can be interesting to know. Even the 
old people of the vale were a little excited by the accounts 
(somewhat exaggerated, perhaps) of the never ending books 
that continued to arrive in packing cases for several months 
in succession. Nothing in these vales so much fixes the 
attention and respect of the people as the reputation of being 
a " far learn'd " man. So far, therefore, I had already bespoken 
the favourable opinion of the Dalesmen. And a separate kind 
of interest arose amongst mothers and daughters, in the 
knowledge that I should necessarily want what — in a sense 



452 DE QUINCEY 

somewhat different from the general one — is called a " house- 
keeper;" that is, not an upper servant to superintend others, 
but one who could undertake, in her own person, all the duties 
of the house. It is not discreditable to these worthy people 
that several of the richest and most respectable families were 
anxious to secure the place for a daughter. Had I been a dis- 
sipated young man, I have good reason to know that there 
would have been no canvassing at all for the situation. But 
partly my books spoke for the character of my pursuits with 
these simple-minded people — partly the introduction of the 
Wordsworths guaranteed the safety of such a service. Even 
then, had I persisted in my original intention of bringing a 
man-servant, no respectable young woman would have accepted 
the place. As it was, and it being understood that I had 
renounced this intention, many, in a gentle, diffident way, 
applied for the place, or their parents on their behalf. And I 
mention the fact, because it illustrates one feature in the man- 
ners of this primitive and peculiar people, the Dalesmen of 
Westmoreland. However wealthy, they do not think it degrad- 
ing to permit even the eldest daughter to go out a few years 
to service. The object is not to gain a sum of money in 
wages, but that sort of household experience which is supposed 
to be unattainable upon a suitable scale out of a gentleman's 
family. So far was this carried, that, amongst the offers made 
to myself, was one from a young woman whose family was 
amongst the very oldest in the country, and who was at that 
time under an engagement of marriage to the very richest 
young man in the vale. She and her future husband had a 
reasonable prospect of possessing ten thousand pounds in land; 
and yet neither her own family nor her husband's objected to 
her seeking such a place as I could offer. Her character and 
manners, I ought to add, were so truly excellent, and won 
respect so inevitably from everybody that nobody could wonder 
at the honourable confidence reposed in her by her manly and 
spirited young lover. The issue of the matter, as respected my 
service, was, why I do not know, that Miss Wordsworth did 
not accept of her: and she fulfilled her purpose in another fam- 
ily, a very grave and respectable one, in Kendal. She stayed 
about a couple of years, returned, and married the young man 
to whom she had engaged herself, and is now the prosperous 
mother of a fine handsome family; and she together with her 
mother-in-law, are the two leading matrons of the vale. 

It was on a November night, about ten o'clock, that I first 
found myself installed in a house of my own — this cottage, so 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 453 

memorable from its past tenant to all men, so memorable to 
myself from all which has since past in connection with it. A 
writer in "The Quarterly Review," in noticing the autobi- 
ography of t)r. Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, has thought 
fit to say that the lakes, of course, afforded no society capable 
of appreciating this commonplace, coarse-minded man of tal- 
ents. The person who said this I understand to have been 
Dr. Whitaker, the respectable antiquary. Now, that the reader 
may judge of the propriety with which this was asserted, I shall 
slightly rehearse the muster-roll of our lake society, as it existed 
at the time when I seated myself in my Grasmere cottage. I 
will undertake to say, that the meanest person in the whole 
scattered community was more extensively accomplished than 
the good bishop, was more conscientiously true to his duties, 
and had more varied powers of conversation. Wordsworth 
and Coleridge, then living at Allan Bank, in Grasmere, I will 
not notice in such a question. Southey, living thirteen miles 
off, at Keswick, I have already noticed; and he needs no 
proneur. I will begin with Windermere. At Clappersgate, a 
little hamlet of perhaps six houses, on its north-west angle, and 
about five miles from my cottage, resided two Scottish ladies, 
daughters of Dr. Cullen, the famous physician and nosologist. 
They were universally beloved for their truly kind dispositions 
and the firm independence of their conduct. They had been 
reduced from great affluence to a condition of rigourous pov- 
erty. Their father had made what should have been a fortune 
by his practice. The good doctor, however, was careless of 
his money in proportion to the facility with which he made it. 
All was put into a box, open to the whole family. Breach of 
confidence, in the most thoughtless use of this money, there 
could be done ; because no restraint in that point, beyond what 
honour and good sense imposed, was laid upon any of the elder 
children. Under such regulations, it may be imagined that 
Dr. Cullen would not accumulate any very large capital; and, 
at his death, the family, for the first time, found themselves in 
embarrassed circumstances. Of the two daughters who 
belonged to our lake population, one had married a Mr. Millar, 
son to the celebrated professor Millar, of Glasgow. This gen- 
tleman had died in America; and Mrs. Millar was now a child- 
less widow. The other still remained unmarried. Both were 
equally independent; and independent even with regard to 
their nearest relatives; for, even from their brother — who had 
risen to rank and affluence as a Scottish judge, under the title 
of Lord Cullen — they declined to receive assistance; and 



454 ^E QUINCEY 

except for some small addition made to their income by a 
novel called " Home," [in as many as seven volumes, I really 
believe,] by Miss Cullen, their expenditure was rigourously 
shaped to meet that very slender income, which they drew from 
their shares of the patrimonial wrecks. More honourable and 
modest independence, or poverty more gracefully supported, I 
have rarely known. 

Meantime, these ladies, though literary and very agreeable 
in conversation, could not be classed with what now began to 
be known as the lake community of literati; for they took no 
interest in any one of the lake poets; did not affect to take 
any; and I am sure they were not aware of so much value in any 
one thing these poets had written, as could make it worth while 
even to look into their books; and accordingly as well-bred 
women, they took the same course as was pursued for several 
years by Mrs. Hannah More, viz. cautiously to avoid mention- 
ing their names in my presence. This was natural enough in 
women who had probably built their early admiration upon 
French models, (for Mrs. Millar used to tell me that she 
regarded the " Mahomet " of Voltaire as the most perfect of 
human compositions,) and still more so at a period when almost 
all the world had surrendered their opinions and their literary 
consciences (so to speak) into the keeping of " The Edinburgh 
Review"; in whose favour, besides, those ladies had the pardon- 
able possessions of national pride, as a collateral guarantee of 
that implicit faith, which, in those days, stronger-minded people 
than they took a pride in professing. Still, in defiance of pre- 
judices mustering so strongly to support their blindness, and 
the still stronger support which this blindness drew from their 
total ignorance of everything either done or attempted by the 
lake poets, these amiable women persisted in one uniform tone 
of courteous forbearance, as often as any question arose to 
implicate the names either of Wordsworth or Coleridge; any 
question about them, their books, their families, or anything 
that was theirs. They thought it strange, indeed, (for so much 
I heard by a circuitous course,) that promising and intelligent 
young men — men educated at great universities, such as Mr. 
Wilson of Elleray, or myself, or a few others who had paid us 
visits, — should possess so deep a veneration for these writers; 
but evidently this was an infatuation — a craze, originating, 
perhaps, in personal connections; and, as the craze of valued 
friends, to be treated with tenderness. For us therefore — for 
our sakes — they took a religious care to suppress all allusion 
to these disreputable names; and it is pretty plain how sincere 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 455 

their indifference must have been with regard to these neigh- 
bouring authors, from the evidence of one fact viz. that wh^ 
in "sTo Mr. Coleridge began to issue, m weekly numbers, his 
"Friend," which,by the prospectus, held fortha promise of meet- 
ing aU possible 'tastes -literary, philosophic, Pol'^'cal -- even 
thfs comprehensive field of interest, ^°7^bined with the advent^ 
tious attt-action (so very unusual, and so little to have Deen 
{ooked for in that thinly-peopled region) of a local origin from 
the bosom of those very hills, at the foot of which (though on a 
d^fferent"ide they were themselves living, failed altogether to 
s^taXe Ae ir to^id curiosity; so perfect was their persuasion 
b forehand, that no good thing <=o"'d by possil^hty come ou^ 
of a community that had fallen under the ban of the Edinburgh 

^"If the same time, it is melancholy to confess that, partly 
from the dejection of Coleridge; his constant immersion in 
S™ at that period; his hatred of the duties he had a ed 
or at least of their too frequent and periodical recurrence, and 
pLt y a"o fLm the bad selection of topics for a nusceUaneous 
audience- from the heaviness and obscurity w th which they 
were treated; and from the total want of variety; in conse- 
Guence of de ective arrangements on his part for ensuring the 
2o-operation of his friends-, no conceivable act of authorship 
tha? Cokridge could have perpetrated, no possible overt act 
of dulness an^d somnolent darkness that he couW have author^ 
ized, was so well fitted to sustain the impress on, with regard 
o him and his friends, that had pre-occupied these lad es 
r^inds "Habes confitentem reum!" I am sure they would 
Scla m- not perhaps confessing to that form of delinquency 
whichThey had been taught to expect -trivial or extravagan 
Tentimentalism ; Germanity alternating with t^n^'d inanity ; not 
this but something quite as bad or worse, viz. palpable dulness 
-1 dulness that could be felt and handled - rayless obscurity 
as to the thoughts — and communicated in language tnat, 
according to the Bishop of Llandafi's complaint, was not always 
Enelish. For, though the particular words cited for blame 
wer^e certainly known to the vocabulary of metaphysics, and had 
even been employed by a writer of Queen ^""e/^.'-^g"; (Leib- 
nitz,) who, if any, had the gift of translating dark tu-^ughts nto 
plain ones - still it was intolerable, in point of good sense, that 
one who had to win his way into the public ear, should begin by 
bringing, before a popular and miscellaneous audience themes 
that couid require such startling and revolting words The 
Delphic Oracle was the kindest of the nicknames which the 



456 DE QUINCE Y 

literary taste of Windermere conferred upon the new journal. 
This was the laughing suggestion of a clever young lady, a 
daughter of the Bishop of Llandaff, who stood in a neutral 
position with regard to Coleridge. But others there were 
amongst his supposed friends, who felt even more keenly than 
this young lady, the shocking want of adaptation to his audience 
in the choice of matter; and, even to an audience better quali- 
fied to meet such matter, the want of adaptation in the mode 
of publication, viz. periodically, and by weekly recurrence; a 
mode of soliciting the public attention which even authorizes 
the expectation of current topics — topics arising each with its 
own week or day. One in particular I remember, of these dis- 
approving friends; a Mr. Blair, an accomplished scholar, and 
a frequent visitor at Elleray, who started the playful scheme of 
satirical rejoinder to Coleridge's " Friend," under the name of 
" The Enemy,'' which was to follow always in the wake of its 
leader, and to stimulate Coleridge, [at the same time that it 
amused the public,] by Attic banter, or by downright opposi- 
tion, and showing fight in good earnest. It was a plan that 
might have done good service to the world, and chiefly through 
a seasonable irritation (never so much wanted as then) appHed 
to Coleridge's too lethargic state: in fact, throughout life, it 
is most deeply to be regretted that Coleridge's powers and 
peculiar learning were never forced out into a large display 
by intense and almost persecuting opposition. However, this 
scheme, like thousands of other day-dreams and bubbles that 
rose upon the breath of morning spirits and buoyant youth, 
fell to the ground ; and, in the meantime, no enemy to " The 
Friend " appeared that was capable of matching " The Friend " 
when left to itself and its own careless or vagrant guidance. 
"The Friend" ploughed heavily along for nine-and-twenty num- 
bers; and our fair recusants and non-conformists in all that 
regarded the lake poetry or authorship, the two Scottish ladies 
of Clappersgate, found no reasons for changing their opinions; 
but continued, for the rest of my acquaintance with them, to 
practise the same courteous and indulgent silence, whenever 
the names of Coleridge or Wordsworth happened to be 
mentioned. 

In taking leave of these Scottish ladies, it may be interesting 
to mention that, previously to their final farewell to our lake 
society, upon taking up their permanent residence in York, 
(which step they adopted — partly, I believe, to enjoy the more 
diversified society which that great city yields, and, at any rate, 
the more accessible society than amongst mountain districts — 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 457 

partly with a view to the cheapness of that rich district in com- 
parison with our sterile soil, poor towns, and poor agriculture,) 
somewhere about the May or June of 1810, I think-— they were 
able, by a long preparatory course of economy, to invite to the 
English Lakes a family of foreigners — what shall I call them? 
— a family of Anglo-Gallo-Americans, from the Carolinas. 
The invitation had been of old standing, and offered, as an 
expression of gratitude, from these ladies, for many hospitali- 
ties and friendly services rendered by the two heads of that 
family to Mrs. Millar in former years, and under circumstances 
of peculiar trial. Mrs. Millar had been hastily summoned from 
Scotland to attend her husband at Charleston; him, on her 
arrival, she found dying; and, whilst overwhelmed by this sud- 
den blow, it may be imagined that the young widow would 
find trials enough for her fortitude, without needing any addi- 
tion to the load, from friendliness amongst a nation of strang- 
ers, and from total soHtude. These evils were spared to Mrs. 
Millar, through the kind offices and disinterested exertions of 
an American gentleman, (French by birth, but American by 
adoption,) M. Simond, who took upon himself the cares of 
superintending Mr. Millar's funeral through all its details; and, 
by this most seasonable service, secured to the heart-stricken 
widow that most welcome of privileges in all situations, the 
privilege of unmolested privacy; for assuredly the heaviest 
aggravation of such bereavements lies in the necessity, too 
often imposed by circumstances, upon him or upon her, who 
may happen to be the sole responsible representative, and, at 
the same time, the dearest friend of the deceased, of superin- 
tending the funeral arrangements. In the very agonies of a 
new-born grief, whilst the heart is yet raw and bleeding, the 
mind not yet able to comprehend its loss, the very light of day 
hateful to the eyes; the necessity, even at such a moment arises, 
and without a day's delay, and of facing strangers, 
talking with strangers, discussing the most empty 
details, with a view to the most sordid of considera- 
tions — cheapness, convenience, custom and local prejudice; 
and, finally, talking about whom? why, the very child, 
husband, wife, who has just been torn away; and this, too, 
under a consciousness that the being so hallowed is, as to these 
strangers, an object equally indifferent with any one person 
whatsoever that died a thousand years ago. Fortunate, indeed, 
is that person who has a natural friend, or, in default of such 
a friend, who finds a volunteer stepping forward to relieve him 
from a conflict of feeHng so peculiarly unseasonable. Mrs. 



458 DE QUINCEY 

Millar never forgot the service which had been rendered to her; 
and she was happy when M. Simond, who had become a 
wealthy citizen of America, at length held out the prospect of 
coming to profit by her hospitable attentions, amongst that 
circle of friends with whom she and her sister had surrounded 
themselves in so interesting a part of England. 

M. Simond had been a French emigrant; not, I believe, so 
far connected with the privileged orders of his country, or 
with any political party, as to be absolutely forced out of France 
by danger or by panic; but he had shared in the feelings of 
those who were. Revolutionary France, in the anarchy of the 
transition state, and still heaving to and fro with the subsiding 
shocks of the great earthquake, did not suit him: there was 
neither the polish which he sought in its manners, nor the 
security which he sought in its institutions. England he did 
not love; but yet, if not England, some country which had 
grown up from English foundations was the country for him; 
and, as he augured no rest for France, through some genera- 
tions to come, but an endless succession of revolution to revolu- 
tion, anarchy to anarchy, he judged it best that, having expatri- 
ated himself and lost one country, he should solemnly adopt 
another. Accordingly he became an American citizen. Eng- 
lish he already spoke with propriety and fluency. And, finally, 
he cemented his English connections by marrying an English 
lady, the niece of John Wilkes. "What John Wilkes?" asked a 
lady, one of a dinner-party at Calgarth, (the house of Dr. Wat- 
son, the celebrated Bishop of Llandaff,) upon the banks of 
Windermere. — "What John Wilkes?" re-echoed the Bishop, 
with a vehement intonation of scorn; "What John Wilkes, 
indeed! as if there ever was more than one John Wilkes — 
fama super aethera notos!" — "O, my Lord, I beg your pardon," 
said an old lady, nearly connected with the Bishop, "there were 
two; I knew one of them: he was a little, ill-looking man, and 

he kept the Blue Boar at ." —"At Flamborough Head!" 

roared the Bishop, with a savage expression of disgust. The 
old lady, suspecting that some screw was loose in the matter, 
thought it prudent to drop the contest; but she muttered, sotto 
voce, "No, not at Flamborough Head, but at Market Drayton." 
Madame Simond, then, was the niece, not of the ill-looking host 
of the Blue Boar, but of the Wilkes, so memorably connected 
with the parvanimities of the English government at one 
period; with the casuistry of our English constitution, by the 
questions raised in his person as to the effects of expulsion 
from the House of Commons, etc., etc.; and, finally, with the 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 459 



history of English jurisprudence, by his intrepidity on the mat- 
ter of general warrants. M. Simond's party, when at length it 
arrived, consisted of two persons besides himself, viz. his wife, 
the niece of Wilkes, and a young lady of eighteen, standing in 
the relation of grand-niece to the same memorable person. 
This young lady, highly pleasing in her person, on quitting the 
Lake District, went northwards with her party, to Edinburgh, 
and there became acquainted with Mr. Francis Jeffrey, the 
present Lord Jeffrey, who naturally enough fell in love with her, 
followed her across the Atlantic, and in Charleston, I believe, 
received the honour of her hand in marriage. 

I, as one of Mrs. Millar's friends, put in my claim to entertain 
her American party in my turn. One long summer's day, they 
all came over to my cottage in Grasmere ; and as it became my 
duty to do the honours of our vale to the strangers, I thought 
that I could not discharge the duty in a way more likely to 
interest them all, than by conducting them through to Gras- 
mere into the little inner chamber of Easedale ; and there, within 
sight of the solitary cottage, Blentarn Ghyll, telling them the 
story of the Greens; because, in this way, I had an opportunity, 
at the same time, of showing the scenery from some of the best 
points, and of opening to them a few glimpses of the character 
and customs which distinguish this section of the English yeo- 
manry from others. The story did certainly interest them all; 
and thus far I succeeded in my duties as Cicerone and Amphy- 
trion of the day. But throughout the rest of our long morn- 
ing's ramble, I remember that accident, or, possibly the polite- 
ness of M. Simond and his French sympathy with a young 
man's natural desire to stand well in the eyes of a handsome 
young woman, so ordered it, that I had constantly the honour 
of being Miss Wilkes' immediate companion, as the narrowness 
of the path pretty generally threw us into ranks of two and two. 
Having, therefore, through so many hours, the opportunity of 
an exclusive conversation with this young lady, it would have 
been my own fault had I failed to carry ofif an impression of 
her great good sense, as well as her amiable and spirited char- 
acter. Certainly I did mon possible to entertain her, both on 
her own account and as the visitor of my Scottish friends. But, 
in the midst of all my efforts, I had the mortification to feel 
that I was rowing against the stream: that there was a silent 
body of prepossession against the whole camp of the lakers, 
which nothing could unsettle. Miss Wilkes naturally looked 
up, with some feelings of respect, to M. Simond, who, by his 
marriage with her aunt, had become her own guardian and 



460 DE QUINCEY 

protector. Now, M. Simond, of all the men in the world, was 
the last who could have appreciated an English poet. He had, 
to begin with, a French inaptitude for apprehending poetry at 
all: any poetry, that is, which transcends manners and the 
interests in social life. Then, unfortunately, not merely through 
what he had not, but equally through what he had, this cleverish 
Frenchman was, by whole diameters of the earth, remote from 
the station at which he could comprehend Wordsworth. He 
was a thorough knowing man of the world, keen, sharp as a 
razor, and valuing nothing but the tangible and the ponderable. 
He had a smattering of mechanics, of physiology, geology, 
mineralogy, and all other ologies whatsoever; he had, besides, 
at his fingers' ends, a huge body of statistical facts — how many 
people did live, could live, ought to live, in each particular dis- 
trict of each manufacturing county; how many old women of 
eighty-three there ought to be to so many little children of one; 
how many murders ought to be committed in a month by each 
town of five thousand souls; and so on ad infinitum. And to 
such a thin shred had his old French politeness been worn 
down by American attrition, that his thin lips could, with much 
ado, contrive to disguise his contempt for those who failed to 
meet him exactly upon his own field, with exactly his own 
quality of knowledge. Yet, after all, it was but a little case of 
knowledge, that he had packed up neatly for a make-shift; just 
what corresponds to the little assortment of razors, tooth- 
brushes, nail brushes, hair-brushes, cork-screw, gimlet, etc., 
etc., which one carries in one's trunk, in a red Morocco case, 
to meet the casualties of a journey. The more one was indig- 
nant at being the object of such a man's contempt, the more 
heartily did one disdain his disdain, and recalcitrate his kicks. 

On the single day which Mrs. Millar could spare for Gras- 
mere, I had taken care to ask Wordsworth amongst those who 
were to meet the party. Wordsworth came; but, by instinct, 
he and Monsieur Simond knew and recoiled from each other. 
They met, they saw, they interdespised. Wordsworth, on his 
side, seemed so heartily to despise M. Simond, that he did not 
stir to make an effort to right himself under any misapprehen- 
sion of the Frenchman, but coolly acquiesced in any and every 
inference which he might be pleased to draw; whilst M. Simond, 
double-charged with contempt from " The Edinburgh Review," 
and from the report (I cannot doubt) of his present hostess, 
manifestly thought Wordsworth too abject almost for the 
trouble of too openly disdaining him. More than one of us 
could have done justice on this malefactor, by meeting M. 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 46 1 

Simond on his own ground, and taking the conceit out of him 
most thoroughly. I was one of those; iov I h^d the very 
knowledge, or some of it, that he most paraded. But one of 
us was lazy; another thought it not tanti; and I, for my part, in 
mv own house, could not move upon such a service And in 
those days, moreover, when as yet I loved Wordsworth not less 
than I venerated him, a success that would have made him 
suffer in any man's opinion by comparison with myself, would 
have been painful to my feeUngs. Never did party meet more 
exquisitely ill-assorted; never did party separate with more 
exquisite and cordial disgust, in its principal members towards 
each other. I mention the case at all, in order to illustrate the 
abject condition of worldly opinion in which Wordsworth then 
lived Perhaps his ill-fame was just then in its meridian; for 
M. Simond, soon after, published his English tour in two octavo 
volumes; and, of course, he goes over his residence at the 
lakes; vet it is a strong fact that, according to my remembrance, 
he does not vouchsafe to mention such a person as Words- 

^°One anecdote, before parting with these ladies, I will men- 
tion, as received from Miss Cullen on her personal knowledge 
of the fact. There are stories current which resemble this; but 
wanting an immediate guarantee for their accuracy which, in 
this case, I at least was obliged to admit, in the attestation ot 
so perfectly veracious a reporter as this excellent lady. _ A 
female friend of her own, a person of family and consideration, 
being on the eve of undertaking a visit to a remote part of the 
kingdom, dreamed that, on reaching the end of her journey, 
and drawing up to the steps of the door, a footman, with a very 
marked and forbidding expression of countenance, his com- 
plexion pale and bloodless, and his manners sullen, presented 
himself to let down the steps of her carriage. This same man, 
at a subsequent point of her dream, appeared to be stealing up 
a private staircase, with some murderous instruments in his 
hands, towards a bed-room door. This dream was repeated, I 
think, twice. Some time after, the lady, accompanied by a 
grown-up daughter, accomplished her journey. Great was the 
shock which awaited her on reaching her friend's house: a ser- 
vant, corresponding in all points to the shadowy outline of her 
dream, equally bloodless in complexion, and equally gloomy 
in manner, appeared at her carriage door. The issue of the 
story was —that upon a particular night, after a stay of some 
length the lady grew unaccountably nervous ; resisted her feel- 
ings for some time; but at length, at the entreaty of her daugh- 



462 DE QUINCEY 

ter, who slept In the same room, suffered some communication 
of the case to be made to a gentleman resident in the house, 
who had not yet retired to rest. This gentleman, struck by the 
dream, and still more on recalling to mind some suspicious 
preparations, as if for a hasty departure, in which he had 
detected the servant, waited in concealment until three o'clock 
in the morning — at which time hearing a stealthy step mov- 
ing up the staircase, he issued with fire-arms, and met the man 
at the lady's door, so equipped as to leave no doubt of his inten- 
tions; which possibly contemplated only robbing the lady's 
jewels, but possibly also to murder in a case of extremity. 
There are other stories with some of the same circumstances; 
and, in particular, I remember one very like it in Dr. Aber- 
crombie's " Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers,'' 
[1830,] p. 283. But in this version of Dr. Abercrombie's, 
(supposing it another version of the same story,) the striking 
circumstance of anticipating the servant's features is omitted; 
and in no version, except this of Miss Cullen's, have I heard 
the names mentioned both of the parties to the affair, and also 
of the place at which it occurred. 

Notes 

* The idea of the picturesque is one which did not exist at all until 
the post-Christian ages; neither amongst the Grecians nor amongst 
the Romans; and therefore, as respects one reason, it was, that the 
art of landscape painting did not exist (except in a Chinese infancy, 
and as a mere trick of inventive ingenuity) amongst the finest artists 
of Greece. What is picturesque, as placed in relation to the beautiful 
and the sublime? It is (to define it by the very shortest form of 
words) the characteristic, pushed into a sensible excess. The pre- 
vailing character of any natural object, no matter how little attractive 
it may be for beauty, is always interesting for itself, as the character 
and hieroglyphic symbol of the purposes pursued by Nature in the 
determination of its form, style of motion, texture of superficies, rela- 
tion of parts, etc. 

Thus, for example, an expression of dulness and somnolent torpor 
does not ally itself with grace or elegance; but, in combination with 
strength and other qualities, it may compose a character of service- 
able and patient endurance, as in the cart-horse, having unity in itself, 
and tending to one class of uses sufficient to mark it out by circum- 
scription for a distinct and separate contemplation. Now, in com- 
bination with certain counteracting circumstances, as with the mornen- 
tary energy of some great effort, much of this peculiar character might 
be lost, or defeated, or dissipated. On that account, the skillful 
observer will seek out circum.stances that are in harmony with the 
principal tendencies and assist them; such, suppose, as a state of lazy 
relaxation from labour, and the fall of heavy drenching rain causing 
the head to droop, and the shaggy mane, together with the fetlocks, 
to weep. These, and other circumstances of attitude, etc., bring out 
the character or prevailing tendency of the animal in some excess; 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 463 

and, in such a case, we call the resulting effect to the eye — pictur- 
esque: or in fact, characteresque. In extending this speculation to 
objects of art and human purposes, there is something more required 
of subtle investigation. Meantime, it is evident that neither the sub- 
lime nor the beautiful depends upon any secondary interest of a pur- 
pose or of a character expressing that purpose. They (confining the 
case to visual objects) court the primary interest involved in that 
(form, colour, texture, attitude, motion), which forces admiration, 
which fascinates the eye, for itself, and without a question of any dis- 
tinct purpose: and, instead of character — that is, discriminating and 
separating expression, tending to the special and the individual — they 
both agree in pursuing the Catholic — the Normal — the Ideal. 

* " Wraie " is the old Danish, or Icelandic word for angle. Hence 
the many " wrays " in the Lake District. 



II 

PASSING onwards from Brathay, a ride of about forty 
minutes carries you to the summit of a wild heathy 
tract, along which, even at noonday, few sounds are 
heard that indicate the presence of man, except now 
and then a woodman's axe, in some of the many coppice- 
woods scattered about that neighbourhood. In Northern 
England there are no sheep-bells; which is an unfortunate 
defect, as regards the full impression of wild solitudes, 
whether amongst undulating heaths, or towering rocks: 
at any rate, it is so felt by those who, like myself, have been 
trained to its soothing effects, upon the hills of Somersetshire 
— the Cheddar, the Mendip, or the Quantock — or any other 
of those breezy downs, which once constituted such delightful 
local distinctions for four or five counties in that south-west 
angle of England. At all hours of day or night, this silvery 
tinkle was delightful; but, after sunset, in the solemn hour of 
gathering twilight, heard (as it always was) intermittingly, and 
at great varieties of distance, it formed the most impressive 
incident for the ear, and the most in harmony with the other 
circumstances of the scenery, that, perhaps, anywhere exists — 
not excepting even the natural sounds, the swelling and dying 
intonations of insects wheeling in their vesper flights. 
Silence and desolation are never felt so profoundly as when 
they are interrupted by solemn sounds, recurring by uncertain 
intervals, and from distant places. But in these Westmoreland 
heaths, and uninhabited ranges of hilly ground, too often noth- 
ing is heard, except, occasionally, the wild cry of a bird — the 
plover, the snipe, or perhaps the raven's croak. The general 
impression is, therefore, cheerless; and the more are you 
rejoiced when, looking down from some one of the eminences 
which you have been gradually ascending, you descry, at a 
great depth below,^ the lovely lake of Coniston. The head of 
this lake is the part chiefly interesting, both from the sublime 
character of the mountain barriers, and from the intricacy of 
the little valleys at their base. On a little verdant knoll, near 
the north-eastern margin of the lake, stands a small villa, called 
Tent Lodge, built by Colonel Smith, and for many years occu- 

464 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 465 

pied by his family. That daughter of Colonel Smith, who drew 
the public attention so powerfully upon herself by the splendour 
of her attainments, had died some months before I came into 
the country. But yet, as I was subsequently acquainted with 
her family through the Lloyds, (who were within an easy drive 
of Tent Lodge,) and as, moreover, with regard to Miss Eliza- 
beth Smith herself, I came to know more than the world knew 
— drawing my knowledge from many of her friends, but especi- 
ally from Mrs. Hannah More, who had been intimately con- 
nected with her; for these reasons, I shall rehearse the leading 
points of her story; and the rather, because her family, who 
were equally interested in that story, long continued to form 
part of the Lake society. 

On my first becom.ing acquainted with Miss Smith's pre- 
tensions, it is very true that I regarded them with but little 
concern; for nothing ever interests me less than great philo- 
logical attainments, or at least that mode of philological learn- 
ing which consists in mastery over languages. But one reason 
for this indifference is, that the apparent splendour is too often 
a false one. They who know a vast number of languages, 
rarely know any one with accuracy; and the more they gain 
in one way, the more they lose in another. With Miss Smith, 
however, I gradually came to know that this was not the case; 
or, at any rate, but partially the case; for, of some languages 
which she possessed, and those the least accessible, it appeared, 
finally, that she had even a critical knowledge. It created also 
a secondary interest in these difficult accomplishments of hers, 
to find that they were so very extensive. Secondly, That they 
were pretty nearly all of self-acquisition. Thirdly, That they 
were borne so meekly, and with unaffected absence of all osten- 
tation. As to the first point, it appears (from Mrs. H. Bowdler's 
letter to Dr. Mummsen, the friend of Klopstock) that she 
made herself mistress of the French, the Italian, the Spanish, 
the Latin, the German, the Greek, and the Hebrew languages. 
She had no inconsiderable knowledge of the Syriac, the Arabic, 
and the Persic. She was a good geometrician and algebraist. 
She was a very expert musician. She drew from nature, and 
had an accurate knowledge of perspective. Finally, she mani- 
fested an early talent for poetry; but, from pure modesty, 
destroyed most of what she had written, as soon as her 
acquaintance with the Hebrew models had elevated the stand- 
ard of true poetry in her mind, so as to disgust her with what 
she now viewed as the tameness and inefificiency of her own 
performances. As to the second point — that for these attain- 
30 



466 DE QUINCEY 

ments she was indebted, almost exclusively, to her own energy ; 
this is placed beyond all doubt, by the fact, that the only gov- 
erness she ever had (a young lady not much beyond her own 
age) did not herself possess, and therefore could not have com- 
municated, any knowledge of languages, beyond a little French 
and Italian. Finally, as to the modesty with which she wore 
her distinctions, that is sufficiently established by every page 
of her printed works, and her letters. Greater diffidence, as 
respected herself, or less willingness to obtrude her knowledge 
upon strangers, or even upon those correspondents who would 
have wished her to make a little more display, can not be 
imagined. And yet I repeat, that her knowledge was as sound 
and as profound as it was extensive. For, taking only one 
instance of this, her "Translation of Job" has been pronounced, 
by Biblical critics of the first rank, a work of real and intrinsic 
value, without any reference to the disadvantages of the transla- 
tor, or without needing any allowances whatever. In particular, 
Dr. Magee, the celebrated writer on the Atonement, and subse- 
quently a dignitary of the Irish Church — certainly one of the 
best qualified judges at that time — describes it as " conveying 
more of the character and meaning of the Hebrew, with fewer 
departures from the idiom of the English, than any other trans- 
lation whatever that we possess." So much for the scholarship; 
whilst he rightly notices, in proof of the translator's taste and 
discretion, that " from the received version she very seldom 
unnecessarily deviates: " thus refusing to disturb what was, gen- 
erally speaking, so excellent and time-hallowed for any dazzling 
effects of novelty; and practising this forbearance as much as 
possible, notwithstanding novelty was, after all, the main attrac- 
tion upon which the new translation must rest. 

The example of her modesty, however, is not more instruc- 
tive than that of her continued struggle with difficulties in pur- 
suing knowledge, and with misfortunes in supporting a Chris- 
tian fortitude. I shall briefly sketch her story: — She was born 
at Burnhall, in the county of Durham, at the latter end of the 
year 1776. Early in 1782, when she had just entered her sixth 
year, her parents removed into Suffolk, in order to be near a 
blind relation, who looked with anxiety to the conscientious 
attentions of Mrs. Smith, in superintending his comforts and 
interests. This occupation absorbed so much of her time, that 
she found it necessary to obtain the aid of a stranger in direct- 
ing the studies of her daughter. An opportunity just then 
offered of attaining this object, concurrently with another not 
less interesting to herself, viz. that of offering an asylum to 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 467 

a young lady who had recently been thrown adrift upon the 
world by the misfortunes of her parents. They had very sud- 
denly fallen from a station of distinguished prosperity; and the 
young lady herself, then barely sixteen, was treading that path 
of severe adversity, upon which, by a most singular parallelism 
of ill fortune, her young pupil was destined to follow her steps 
at exactly the same age. Being so prematurely called to the 
office of governess, this young lady was expected rather to act 
as an elder companion, and as a lightener of the fatigues 
attached to their common studies, than exactly as their direct- 
ress. And, at all events, from her who was the only even 
nominal governess that Miss Smith ever had, it is certain that 
she could have learned little or nothing. This arrangement 
subsisted between two and three years, when the death of their 
blind kinsman allowed Mr. Smith's family to leave Sufifolk, and 
resume their old domicile of Burnhall. But from this, by a 
sudden gleam of treacherous prosperity, they were summoned, 
in the following year, (June, 1785,) to the splendid inheritance 
of Piercefield — a show-place upon the river Wye; and, next 
after Tintern Abbey and the river itself, an object of attraction 
to all who then visited the Wye. 

A residence on the Wye, besides its own natural attraction, 
has this collateral advantage, that it brings Bath (not to men- 
tion Clifton and the Hot Wells) within a visiting distance for 
people who happen to have carriages; and Bath, it is hardly 
necessary to say, besides its stationary body of polished and 
intellectual residents, has also a floating casual population of 
eminent or interesting persons, gathered into this focus from 
every quarter of the empire. Amongst the literary connections 
which the Piercefield family had formed in Bath, was one with 
Mrs. Bowdler and her daughter — two ladies not distinguished 
by any very powerful talents, but sufficiently tinctured with 
literature and the love of literature to be liberal in their opin- 
ions. And, fortunately, (as it turned out for Miss Smith,) they 
were eminently religious: but not in a bigoted way; for they 
were conciliating and winning in the outward expression of 
their religious character; capable of explaining their own creed 
with intelligent consistency; and, finally, were the women to 
recommend any creed, by the sanctity and the benignity of their 
own lives. This strong religious bias of the two Bath ladies, 
operated in Miss Smith's favour by a triple service. First of all, 
it was this depth of religious feeling, and, consequently, of 
interest in the Scriptures, which had originally moved the elder 
Mrs. Bowdler to study the Hebrew and the Greek, as the two 



468 DE QUINCEY 

languages in which they had been originally delivered. And 
this example it was of female triumph over their difficulties, 
together with the proof thus given that such attainments were 
entirely reconcilable with feminine gentleness, which first sug- 
gested to Miss Smith the project of her philological studies; 
and, doubtless, these studies, by the constant and agreeable 
occupation which they afforded, overspread the whole field of 
her life with pleasurable activity. *' From the above-mentioned 
visit," says her mother, writing to Dr. Randolph, and referring 
to the visit which these Bath ladies had made to Piercefield — 
"from the above-mentioned visit I date the turn of study which 
Elizabeth ever after pursued, and which I firmly believe the 
amiable conduct of our guests first led her to delight in." Sec- 
ondly, to the religious sympathies which connected these two 
ladies with Miss Smith, was owing the fervour of that friendship, 
which afterwards, in their adversity, the Piercefield family found 
more strenuously exerted in their behalf by the Bowdlers than 
by all the rest of their connections. And, finally, it was this 
piety and religious resignation, with which she had been her- 
self inoculated by her Bath friends, that, throughout the calam- 
itous era of her life, enabled Miss Elizabeth Smith to maintain 
her own cheerfulness unbroken, and greatly to support the fail- 
ing fortitude of her mother. 

This visit of her Bath friends to Piercefield — so memorable 
an event for the whole subsequent life of Miss Smith — 
occurred in the summer of 1789; consequently, when she was 
just twelve and a half years old. And the impressions then 
made upon her childish, but unusually thoughtful, mind, were 
kept up by continual communications, personal or written, 
through the years immediately succeeding. Just two and a half 
years after, in the very month when Miss Smith accomplished 
her fifteenth year, upon occasion of going through the rite of 
Confirmation, according to the discipline of the English 
Church, she received a letter of religious counsel — grave, 
affectionate, but yet humble — from the elder Mrs. Bowdler, 
which might also have been thought to have proceeded from a 
writer who had looked behind the curtain of fate, and had seen 
the forge at whose fires the shafts of Heaven were even now 
being forged. 

Just twelve months from the date of this letter, in the very 
month when Miss Elizabeth Smith completed her sixteenth 
year, the storm descended upon the house of Piercefield. The 
whole estate, a splendid one, was swept away, by the failure (as 
I have heard) of one banking-house; nor was there recovered, 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 469 

until some years after, any slender fragments of that estate. 
Piercefield was, of course, sold; but that was not the heaviest 
of her grievances to Miss Smith. She was now far advanced 
upon her studious career; for it should be mentioned, as a les- 
son to other young ladies of what may be accomplished by 
unassisted labour,that,between the ages of thirteen and twenty- 
one, all her principal acquisitions were made. No treasure, 
therefore, could, in her eyes, be of such priceless value as the 
Piercefield library; but this also followed the general wreck: 
not a volume, not a pamphlet, was reserved; for the family 
were proud in their integrity, and would receive no favours from 
the creditors. Under this scorching test, applied to the fidelity 
of friends, many, whom Mrs. Smith mentions in one of her let- 
ters under the name of " summer friends," fled from them by 
crowds: dinners, balls, soirees — credit, influence, support — 
these things were no longer to be had from Piercefield. But 
more annoying even than the fickle levity of such open desert- 
ers, was the timid and doubtful countenance, as I have heard 
Mrs. Smith say, which was still offered to them by some who 
did not relish, for their own sakes, being classed with those who 
had paid their homage only to the fine house and fine equi- 
pages of Piercefield. These persons continued, therefore, to 
send invitations to the family; but so frigidly, that every expres- 
sion manifested but too forcibly how disagreeable was the duty 
with which they were complying; and how much more they 
submitted to it for their own reputation's sake, than for any 
kindness they felt to their old friends. Mrs. Smith was her- 
self a very haughty woman, and it maddened her to be the 
object of condescensions so insolent and so reluctant. 

Meantime, her daughter, young as she was, became the 
moral support of her whole family, and the fountain from which 
they all drew consolation and fortitude. She was confirmed in 
her religious tendencies by two circumstances of her recent 
experience: one was, that she, the sole person of her family 
who courted religious consolations, was also the sole person 
who had been able to maintain cheerfulness and uniform 
spirits: the other was, that although it could not be truly said 
of all their worldly friends that they had forsaken them, yet, 
of their religious friends it could be said, not one had done 
so; and at last, when for some time they had been so far 
reduced as not to have a roof over their heads, by one of these 
religious friends it was that they were furnished with every 
luxury as well as comfort of life; and, in a spirit of such sisterly 



470 DE QUINCEY 

kindness, as made the obligation not painful to the proudest 
amongst them. 

It was in 1792 that the Piercefield family had been ruined; 
and in 1794, out of the wrecks which had been gathered 
together, Mr. Smith (the father of the family) bought a com- 
mission in the army. For some time the family continued to 
live in London, Bath, and other parts of England; but, at 
length, Mr. Smith's regiment was ordered to the west of Ire- 
land; and the ladies of his family resolved to accompany him 
to head-quarters. In passing through Wales, (May, 1796,) 
they paid a visit to those sentimental anchorites of the last 
generation, whom so many of us must still remember — Miss 
Ponsonby, and Lady Eleanor Butler, (a sister of Lord 
Ormond,) whose hermitage stood near to Llangollen, and, 
therefore, close to the usual Irish route, by way of Holyhead. 
On landing in Ireland, they proceeded to a seat of Lord King- 
ston — a kind-hearted, hospitable Irishman, who was on the 
old Piercefield list of friends, and had never wavered in his 
attachment. Here they stayed three weeks. Miss Smith 
renewed, on this occasion, her friendship with Lady Isabella 
King, the daughter of Lord Kingston; and a little incident 
connected with this visit, gave her an opportunity afterwards 
of showing her delicate sense of the sacred character which 
attaches to gifts of friendship, and showing it by an ingenious 
device, that may be worth the notice of other young ladies in 
the same case. Lady Isabella had given to Miss Smith a beau- 
tiful horse, called Brunette. In process of time, when they had 
ceased to be in the neighbourhood of any regimental. stables, 
it became matter of necessity that Brunette should be parted 
with. To have given the animal away, had that been otherwise 
possible, might only have been delaying the sale for a short 
time. After some demur, therefore. Miss Smith adopted this 
plan: she sold Brunette, but applied the whole of the price, 120 
guineas, to the purchase of a splendid harp. The harp was 
christened Brunette, and was reHgiously preserved to the end 
of her life. Now Brunette, after all, must have died in a few 
years; but, by translating her friend's gift into another form, 
she not only connected the image of her distant friend, and her 
sense of that friend's kindness, with a pleasure and a useful 
purpose of her own, but she conferred on that gift a perpetuity 
of existence. 

At length came the day when the Smiths were to quit King- 
ston Lodge for the quarters of the regiment. And now came 
the first rude trial of Mrs. Smith's fortitude, as connected with 






SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 47 i 

points of mere decent comfort. Hitherto, floating amongst 
the luxurious habitations of opulent friends, she might have 
felt many privations as regarded splendour and direct personal 
power, but never as regarded the primary elements of comfort, 
warmth, cleanliness, convenient arrangements. But on this 
journey, which was performed by all the party on horseback, it 
^rained incessantly. They reached their quarters drenched with 
wet, weary, hungry, forlorn. The quartermaster had neglected 
to give any directions for their suitable accommodation — no 
preparations whatever had been made for receiving them; and, 
from the luxuries of Lord Kingston's mansion, which habit had 
made so familiar to them all, the ladies found themselves sud- 
denly transferred to a miserable Irish cabin — dirty, narrow, 
nearly quite unfurnished, and thoroughly disconsolate. Mrs. 
Smith's proud spirit fairly gave way, and she burst out into a 
fit of weeping. Upon this, her daughter Elizabeth, [and Mrs. 
Smith herself it was that told the anecdote, and often she told 
it, or told others of the same character, at Lloyd's,] in a gentle, 
soothing tone, began to suggest the many blessings which lay 
before them in life, and some even for this evening. 

" Blessings, child! " — her mother impatiently interrupted her. 
"What sort of blessings? .Irish blessings! — county of SHgo 
blessings, I fancy. Or, perhaps, you call this a blessing?" hold- 
ing up a miserable fragment of an iron rod, which had been 
left by way of poker, or rather as a substitute for the whole 
assortment of fire-irons. The daughter laughed; but she 
changed her wet dress expeditiously, assumed an apron; and 
so various were her accomplishments, that, in no long time, 
she had gathered together a very comfortable dinner for her 
parents, and, amongst other things, a currant tart, which she 
had herself made, in a tenement absolutely unfurnished of 
every kitchen utensil. 

In the autumn of this year, (1796,) they returned to England; 
and, after various migrations through the next four years, 
amongst which was another and longer visit to Ireland, in 
1800, they took up their abode in the sequestered vale of 
Patterdale. Here they had a cottage upon the banks of Ulles- 
water; the most gorgeous of the English lakes, from the rich 
and ancient woods which possess a great part of its western 
side; the sublimest, as respects its mountain accompaniments, 
except only, perhaps, Wastdale; and, I believe, the largest; 
for, though only nine miles in length, and, therefore, shorter by 
about two miles than Windermere, it averages a greater 
breadth. Here, at this time, was living Mr. Clarkson — that 



472 DE QUINCEY 

son of thunder, that Titan, who was in fact that one great 
Atlas that bore up the Slave-Trade abolition cause — now rest- 
ing from his mighty labours and nerve-shattering perils. So 
much had his nerves been shattered by all that he had gone 
through in toil, in sufifering, and in anxiety, that, for many years 
I have heard it said, he found himself unable to walk up stairs 
without tremulous motions of his limbs. He was, perhaps, too 
iron a man, too much hke the Talus of Spenser's " Faerie 
Queene,'' to appreciate so gentle a creature as Miss Elizabeth 
Smith. A more suitable friend, and one who thoroughly com- 
prehended her, and expressed his admiration for her in verse, 
was Thomas Wilkinson of Yanwath, a Quaker, a man of taste, 
and of delicate sensibility. He wrote verses occasionally; and 
though feebly enough as respected poetic power, there were 
often such delicate touches of feeling, such gleams of real ten- 
derness, in some redeeming part of each poem, that even 
Wordsworth admired and read them aloud with pleasure. 
Indeed Wordsworth has addressed to him one copy of verses, 
or rather to his spade, which was printed in the collection of 
1807, and which Lord Jeffrey, after quoting one line, dis- 
missed as too dull for repetition. 

During this residence upon Ulles water (winter of 1800) it 
was that a very remarkable incident befell Miss Smith. I have 
heard it often mentioned, and sometimes with a slight variety 
of circumstances ; but I here repeat it from an account drawn up 
by Miss Smith herself, who was most literally exact and faith- 
ful to the truth in all reports of her own personal experience. 
There is, on the western side of Ulleswater, a fine cataract, (or, 
in the language of the country, a " force,'') known by the name 
of Airey Force; and it is of importance enough, especially in 
rainy seasons, to attract numerous visitors from among " the 
Lakers." Thither, with some purpose of sketching, not the 
whole scene, but some picturesque features of it. Miss Smith 
had gone, quite unaccompanied. The road to it lies through 
Gobarrow Park ; and it was usual, at that time, to take a guide 
from the family of the Duke of Norfolk's keeper, who lived 
in Lyulph's Tower — a soUtary hunting lodge, built by his 
Grace for the purposes of an annual visit which he used to 
pay to his estates in that part of England. She, however, think- 
ing herself sufficiently familiar with the localities, had declined 
to encumber her motions with such an attendant; consequently 
she was alone. For half an hour or more, she continued to 
ascend : and, being a good " cragswoman," from the experience 
she had won in Wales as well as in northern England, she had 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 473 

reached an altitude much beyond what would generally be 
thought corresponding to the time. The path had vanished 
altogether; but she continued to pick out one for herself 
amongst the stones, sometimes receding from the force, some- 
times approaching it, according to the openings allowed by the 
scattered masses of rock. Pressing forward in this hurried 
way, and never looking back, all at once she found herself in 
a little stony chamber, from which there was no egress possible 
in advance. She stopped and looked up. There was a fright- 
ful silence in the air. She felt a sudden palpitation at her heart, 
and a panic from she knew not what. Turning, however, 
hastily, she soon wound herself out of this aerial dungeon; 
but by steps so rapid and agitated, that, at length, on looking 
round, she found herself standing at the brink of a chasm, 
frightful to look down. That way, it was clear enough, all 
retreat was impossible; but, on turning round, retreat seemed 
fn every direction alike even more impossible. Down the 
chasm, at least, she might have leaped, though with little or 
no chance of escaping with life ; but on all other quarters it 
seemed to her eye that, at no price, could she effect an exit, 
since the rocks stood around her, in a semi-circus, all lofty, 
all perpendicular, all glazed, with trickling water, or smooth as 
polished porphyry. Yet how, then, had she reached the point? 
The same track, if she could hit that track, would surely secure 
her escape. Round and round she walked; gazed with almost 
despairing eyes; her breath came thicker and thicker; for path 
she could not trace by which it was possible for her to have 
entered. Finding herself grow more and more confused, and 
every instant nearer to sinking into some fainting fit or con- 
vulsion, she resolved to sit down and turn her thoughts quietly 
into some less exciting channel. This she did; gradually 
recovered some self-possession; and then suddenly a thought 
rose up to her, that she was in the hands of God, and that 
he would not forsake her. But immediately came a second and 
reproving thought — that this confidence in God's protection 
might have been justified had she been ascending the rocks 
upon any mission of duty; but what right could she have to 
any providential deliverance, who had been led thither in a 
spirit of levity and carelessness? I am here giving her view 
of the case; for, as to myself, I fear greatly, that if her steps 
were erring ones, it is but seldom indeed that nous autres can 
pretend to be treading upon right paths. Once again she 
rose! and, supporting herself upon a little sketching-stool that 
folded up into a stick, she looked upwards, in the hope that 



474 DE QUINCEY 

some shepherd might, by chance, be wandering in those aerial 
regions; but nothing could she see except the tall birches 
growing at the brink of the highest summits, and the clouds 
slowly sailing overhead. Suddenly, however, as she swept the 
whole circuit of her station with her alarmed eye, she saw 
clearly, about two hundred yards beyond her own position, a. 
lady, in a white muslin morning robe, such as were then uni- 
versally worn by young ladies until dinner-time. The lady 
beckoned with a gesture and in a manner that, in a moment, 
gave her confidence to advance — how she could not guess, but 
in some way that baffled all power to retrace it, she found 
instantaneously the outlet which previously had escaped her. 
She continued to advance towards the lady, whom now, in the 
same moment, she found to be standing upon the other side 
of the force, and also to be her own sister. How or why that 
young lady, whom she had left at home earnestly occupied with 
her own studies, should have followed and overtaken her, filled 
her with perplexity. But this was no situation for putting 
questions; for the guiding sister began to descend, and, by a 
few simple gestures, just serving to indicate when Miss Eliza- 
beth was to approach and when to leave the brink of the tor- 
rent, she gradually led her down to a platform of rock, from 
which the further descent was safe and conspicuous. There 
Miss Smith paused, in order to take breath from her panic, as 
well as to exchange greetings and questions with her sister. 
But sister there was none. All trace of her had vanished; and 
when, in two hours after, she reached her home, Miss Smith 
found her sister in the same situation and employment in which 
she had left her; and the whole family assured her that she had 
never stirred from the house. 

In 1801, 1 believe it was that the family removed from Patter- 
dale to Coniston. Certainly they were settled there in the 
spring of 1802; for, in the May of that spring. Miss Elizabeth 
Hamilton — a writer now very much forgotten, or remembered 
only by her " Cottagers of Glenburnie ", but then a person of 
mark and authority in the literary circles of Edinburgh — paid 
a visit to the Lakes, and stayed there for many months, together 
with her married sister, Mrs. Blake; and both ladies cultivated 
the friendship of the Smiths. Miss Hamilton was captivated 
with the family; and, of the sisters in particular, she speaks as 
of persons that, " in the days of paganism, would have been 
worshipped as beings of a superior order, so elegantly grace- 
ful do they appear, when, with easy motion, they guide their 
light boat over the waves." And of Miss Elizabeth, separately, 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 475 

she says, on another occasion, — " I never before saw so much 
of Miss Smith; and, in the three days she spent with us, the 
admiration which I had always feh for her extraordinary tal- 
ents, and as extraordinary virtues, was hourly augmented. She 
is, indeed, a most charming creature ; and, if one could inocu- 
late her with a little of the Scotch frankness, I think she would 
be one of the most perfect of human beings." 

About four years had been dehghtfully passed in Coniston. 
In the summer of 1805, Miss Smith laid the foundation of her 
fatal illness in the following way, according to her own account 
of the case, to an old servant, a very short time before she 
died: — "One very hot evening, in July, I took a book, and 
walked about two miles from home, when I seated myself on a 
stone beside the lake. Being much engaged by a poem I was 
reading, I did not perceive that the sun was gone down, and 
was succeeded by >a very heavy dew, till, in a moment, I felt 
struck on the chest as if with a sharp knife. I returned home, 
but said nothing of the pain. The next day, being also very 
hot, and every one busy in the hay-field, I thought I would 
take a rake, and work very hard to produce perspiration, in 
the hope that it might remove the pain ; but it did not." From 
that time, a bad cough, with occasional loss of voice, gave 
reason to suspect some organic injury of the lungs. Late in 
the autumn of this year, (1805,) Miss Smith accompanied her 
mother and her two younger sisters to Bristol, Bath, and other 
places in the south, on visits to various friends. Her health 
went through various fluctuations until May of the following 
year, when she was advised to try Matlock. Here, after spend- 
ing three weeks, she grew worse; and, as there was no place 
which she liked so well as the Lakes, it was resolved to turn 
homewards. About the beginning of June, she and her mother 
returned alone to Coniston: one of her sisters was now mar- 
ried; her three brothers were in the army or navy; and her 
father almost constantly with his regiment. Through the next 
two months she faded quietly away, sitting always in a tent," 
that had been pitched upon the lawn, and which remained open 
continually to receive the fanning of the intermitting airs upon 
the lake, as well as to admit the bold mountain scenery to the 
north. She lived nearly through the first week of August, 
dying on the morning of August 7; and the circumstances of 
her last night are thus recorded by her mother: — " At nine she 
went to bed. I resolved to quit her no more, and went to pre- 
pare for the night Turpin [Miss Smith's maid] came to say 
that Elizabeth entreated I would not stay in her room. I 



476 DE QUINCEY 

replied — 'On that one subject I am resolved; no power on 
earth shall keep me from her; so, go to bed yourself.' Accord- 
ingly, I returned to her room; and, at ten, gave her the usual 
dose of laudanum. After a little time, she fell into a doze, and, 
I thought slept till one. She was uneasy and restless, but 
never complained; and, on my wiping the cold sweat off her 
face, and bathing it with camphorated vinegar, which I did 
very often in the course of the night, she thanked me, smiled, 
and said — 'That is the greatest comfort I have.' She slept 
again for a short time; and, at half past four, asked for some 
chicken broth, which she took perfectly well. On being told the 
hour, she said, * How long this night is ! ' She continued very 
uneasy; and, in half an hour after, and on my inquiring if I 
could move the pillow, or do anything to relieve her, she 
replied, 'There is nothing for it but quiet' At six, she said, 
* I must get up and have some mint tea.' I then called for 
Turpin, and felt my angel's pulse: it was fluttering; and by that 
I knew I should soon lose her. She took the tea well. Turpin 
began to put on her clothes, and was proceeding to dress her, 
when she laid her head upon the faithful creature's shoulder, 
became convulsed in the face, spoke not, looked not, and in ten 
minutes expired." 

She was buried in Hawkshead churchyard, where a small 
tablet of white marble is raised to her memory, on which there 
is the scantiest record that, for a person so eminently accom- 
plished, I have ever met with. After mentioning her birth and 
age, (twenty-nine,) it closes thus: — "She possessed great tal- 
ents, exalted virtues, and humble piety." Anything so unsatis- 
factory or so commonplace I have rarely known. As much, 
or more, is often said of the most insipid people; whereas Miss 
Smith was really a most extraordinary person. I have con- 
versed with Mrs. Hannah More often about her; and I never 
failed to draw forth some fresh anecdote illustrating the vast 
extent of her knowledge, the simplicity of her character, the 
gentleness of her manners, and her unaffected humility. She 
passed, it is true, almost inaudibly through life; and the stir 
which was made after her death soon subsided. But the reason 
was — that she wrote but little! Had it been possible for the 
world to measure her by her powers, rather than her perform- 
ances, she would have been placed, perhaps, in the estimate of 
posterity, at the head of learned women; whilst her sweet and 
feminine character would have rescued her from all shadow 
and suspicion of that reproach which too often settles upon the 
learned character, when supported by female aspirants. 

The family of Tent Lodge continued to reside at Coniston 



I 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 477 

for many years ; and they were connected with the lake literary 
clan chiefly through the Lloyds and those who visited the 
Lloyds; for it is another and striking proof of the slight hold 
which Wordsworth, etc., had upon the public esteem in those 
days, that even Miss Smith, with all her excessive diffidence in 
judging of books and authors, never seems, by any one of her 
letters, to have felt the least interest about Wordsworth or 
Coleridge; nor did Miss Hamilton, with all her esprit de corps 
and acquired interest in everything at all bearing upon Htera- 
ture, ever mention them in those of her letters which belong 
to the period of her Lake visit in 1802; nor, for the six or seven 
months which she passed in that country, and within a short 
morning ride of Grasmere, did she ever think it worth her 
while to seek an introduction to any one of the resident authors. 

Yet this could not be altogether from ignorance that such 
people existed; for Thomas Wilkinson, the intimate and admir- 
ing friend of Miss Smith, was also the friend of Wordsworth; 
and, for some reason that I never could fathom, he was a sort 
of pet with Wordsworth. Professor Wilson or myself were 
never honoured with one line, one allusion from his pen; but 
many a person of particular feebleness has received that honour. 
Amongst these I may rank Thomas Wilkinson ; not that I wish 
to speak contemptuously of him; he was a Quaker, of elegant 
habits, rustic simplicity, and with tastes, as Wordsworth affrms, 
" too pure to be refined." His cottage was seated not far from 
the great castle of the Lowthers ; and, either from mere whim 
— as sometimes such whims do possess great ladies — whims, 
I mean, for drawing about them odd-looking, old-world people, 
as piquant contrasts to the fine gentlemen of their own society, 
or because they did really feel a homely dignity in the plain 
speaking *' Friend," and liked, for a frolic, to be thou'd and 
thee'd — or some motive or other, at any rate, they introduced 
themselves to Mr. Wilkinson's cottage; and I believe that the 
connection was afterwards improved by the use they found for 
his services in forming walks through the woods of Lowther, 
and leading them in such a circuit as to take advantage of all' 
the most picturesque stations. As a poet, I presume that Mr. 
Wilkinson could hardly have recommended himself to the 
notice of ladies who would naturally have modelled their tastes 
upon the favourites of the age. A poet, however, in a gentle, 
unassuming way, he was ; and he, therefore, is to be added to 
the corps litteraire of the Lakes ; and Yanwath to be put down 
as the advanced post of that corps to the north. 

Two families there still remain, which I am tempted to gather 



478 DE QUINCEY 

into my group of Lake society — notwithstanding it is true that 
the two most interesting members of the first had died a Httle 
before the period at which my sketch commences; and the 
second, though highly intellectual in the person of that par- 
ticular member whom I have chiefly to commemorate, was not, 
properly speaking, literary; and, moreover, belongs to a later 
period of my own Westmoreland experience — being, at the 
time of my settlement in Grasmere, a girl at a boarding-school. 
The first was the family of the Sympsons, whom Mr. Words- 
worth has spoken of, with deep interest, more than once. The 
eldest son, a clergyman, and, like Wordsworth, an alumnus of 
Hawkshead school, wrote, amongst other poems, " The Vision 
of Alfred." Of these poems, Wordsworth says, that they " are 
little known; but they contain passages of splendid description; 
and the versification of his ' Vision ' is harmonious and ani- 
mated." This is much for Wordsworth to say; and he does 
him even the honour of quoting the following illustrative simile 
from his description of the sylphs in motion, (which sylphs con- 
stitute the machinery of his poem;) and, probably, the reader 
will be of opinion that this passage justifies the praise of Words- 
worth. It is founded, as he will see, on the splendid scenery 
of the heavens in Polar latitudes, as seen by reflection in pol- 
ished ice at midnight. 

" Less varying hues beneath the Pole adorn 
The streamy glories of the Boreal morn, 
That, waving to and fro, their radiance shed 
On Bothnia's gulf, with glassy ice o'erspread; 
Where the lone native, as he homeward glides. 
On polished sandals o'er the imprisoned tides, 
Sees, at a glance, above him and below. 
Two rival heavens with equal splendour glow; 
Stars, moons, and meteors, ray oppose to ray; 
And solemn midnight pours the blaze of day." 

" He was a man," says Wordsworth, in conclusion, " of 
ardent feeling; and his faculties of mind, particularly his mem- 
ory, were extraordinary." Brief notices of his life ought to 
find a place in the history of Westmoreland. 

But it was the father of this Joseph Sympson who gave its 
chief interest to the family. Him Wordsworth has described, 
at the same time sketching his history, with a fulness and a cir- 
cumstantiality beyond what he has conceded to any other of the 
real personages in " The Excursion." " A priest he was by 
function;" but a priest of that class which is now annually 
growing nearer to extinction among us, not being supported 
by any sympathies in this age. 



I 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 479 

" His course, 
From his youth up, and high as manhood's noon, 
Had been irregular — I might say wild; 
By books unsteadied, by his pastoral care 
Too little check'd. An active, ardent mind; 
A fancy pregnant with resource and scheme 
To cheat the sadness of a rainy day; 
Hands apt for all ingenious arts and games; 
A generous spirit, and a body strong. 
To cope with stoutest champions of the bowl — 
Had earned for him sure welcome, and the rights 
Of a priz'd visitant in the jolly hall 
Of country squire, or at the statelier board 
Of Duke or Earl — from scenes of courtly pomp 
Withdrawn, to while away the summer hours 
In condescension amongst rural guests. 
With these high comrades he had revelled long, 
By hopes of coming patronage beguiled, 
Till the heart sicken'd." 

Slowly, however, and indignantly his eyes opened fully to 
the windy treachery of all the promises held out to him; and, 
at length, for mere bread, he accepted, from an " unthought-of 
patron," a most "secluded chapelry" in Cumberland. This was 
"the little, lowly house of prayer" of Wythburn, elsewhere cele- 
brated by Wordsworth; and, for its own sake, interesting to all 
travellers, both for its deep privacy, and for the excessive 
humility of its external pretensions, whether as to size or orna- 
ment. Were it not for its twin sister at Buttermere, it would 
be the very smallest place of worship in all England; and it 
looks even smaller than it is, from its position; for it stands 
at the base of the mighty Helvellyn, close to the high-road 
between Ambleside and Keswick, and within speaking distance 
of the upper lake — (for Wythburn Water, though usually 
passed by the traveller under the impression of absolute unity 
in its waters, owing to the interposition of a rocky screen, is, in 
fact, composed of two separate lakes.) To this miniature and 
most secluded congregation of shepherds, did the once dazzling 
parson officiate as pastor; and it seems to amplify the impres- 
sion already given of his versatility, that he became a diligent 
and most fatherly, though not peculiarly devout, teacher and 
friend. The temper, however, of the northern Dalesmen, is 
not constitutionally turned to religion; consequently that part 
of his defects did him no especial injury, when compensated 
(as, in the judgment of these Dalesmen, it was compensated) 
by ready and active kindness, charity the most diffusive, and 
patriarchal hospitality. The living, as I have said, was in 
Wythburn; but there was no parsonage, and no house in this 



48o 



DE QUINCEY 



poor dale which was disposable for that purpose. So Mr. 
Sympson crossed the marches of the sister counties, which to 
him was about equidistant from his chapel and his house, into 
Grasmere, on the Westmoreland side. There he occupied a 
cottage by the roadside; a situation which, doubtless, gratified 
at once his social and his hospitable propensities; and, at 
length, from age, as well as from paternal character and station, 
came to be regarded as the patriarch of the vale. Before I men- 
tion the afiflictions which fell upon his latter end, and by way of 
picturesque contrast to his closing scene, let me have permis- 
sion to cite Wordsworth's sketch (taken from his own boyish 
remembrance of the case) describing the first gipsy-like 
entrance of the brilliant parson and his household into Gras- 
mere — so equally out of harmony with the decorums of his 
sacred character and the splendours of his past life : — 

" Rough and forbidding were the choicest roads 
By which our northern wilds could then be crossed; 
And into most of these secluded vales 
Was no access for wain, heavy or light. 
So at his dwelling-place the priest arriv'd, 
With store of household goods in panniers slung 
On sturdy horses, graced with jingling bells; 
And, on the back of more ignoble beast. 
That, with like burthen of effects most priz'd 
Or easiest carried, closed the motley train. 
Young was I then, a schoolboy of eight years: 
But still methinks I see them as they pass'd 
In order — drawing toward their wish'd-for-home. 
Rock'd by the motion of a trusty ass. 
Two ruddy children hung, a well-pois'd freight — 
Each in his basket nodding drowsily. 
Their bonnets, I remember, wreath'd with flowers, 
Which told it was the pleasant month of June. 
And close behind the comely matron rode — 
A woman of soft speech and gracious smile. 
And with a lady's mien. — From far they came, 
Even from Northumbrian hills: yet theirs had been 
A merry journey, rich in pastime, cheer'd 
By music, pranks, and laughter-stirring jest; 
And freak put on, and arch word dropp'd — to swell 
That cloud of fancy and uncouth surmise 
Which gathered round the slowly moving train. 
* Whence do they come? and with what errand charged? 
Belong they to the fortune-telling tribe 
Who pitch their tents under the greenwood tree? 
Or strollers are they, fitted to enact 
Fair Rosamond and the Children of the Wood? 
When the next village hears the show announc'd 
By blast of trumpet? ' Plenteous was the growth 
Of such conjectures — overheard or seen 
On many a staring countenance portray'd 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 48 1 

Of boor or burgher, as they march'd along. 

And more than once their steadiness of face 

Was put to proof, and exercise suppHed 

To their inventive humour, by stern looks, 

And questions in authoritative tone, 

By some staid guardian of the public peace, 

Checking the sober horse on which he rode, 

In his suspicious wisdom; oftener still 

By notice indirect or blunt demand 

From traveller halting in his own despite, 

A simple curiosity to ease: — 

Of which adventures, that beguil'd and cheer'd 

Their grave migration, the good pair Avould tell 

With undiminished glee in hoary age." 

Meantime the lady of the house embellished it with feminine 
skill ; and the homely pastor — for such he had now become — 
not having any great weight of spiritual duties, busied himself 
in rural labours and rural sports. But was his mind, though 
bending submissively to his lot, changed in conformity to his 
task? No: 

" For he still 

Retained a flashing eye, a burning palm, 

A stirring foot, a head which beat at nights 

Upon its pillow with a thousand schemes. 

Few likings had he dropp'd, few pleasures lost; 

Generous and charitable, prompt to serve; 

And still his harsher passions kept their hold — 

Anger and indignation. Still he lov'd 

The sound of titl'd names, and talked in glee 

Of long past banquetings with high-born friends: 

Then from those lulling fits of vain delight 

Uprous'd by recollected injury, rail'd 

At their false ways disdainfully and oft 

In bitterness and with a threatening eye 

Of fire, incens'd beneath its hoary brow. 

Those transports, with staid looks of pure good-will, 

And with soft smile his consort would reprove. 

She, far behind him in the race of years. 

Yet keeping her first mildness, was advanced 

Far nearer, in the habit of her soul. 

To that still region whither all are bound." 

Such was the tenor of their lives ; such the separate character 
of their manners and dispositions; and, with unusual quietness 
of course, both were sailing placidly to their final haven. 
Death had not visited their happy mansion through a space of 
forty years — " sparing both old and young in that abode." But 
calms so deep and ominous — immunities so profound are ter- 
rific. Suddenly the signal was given, and all lay desolate. 
31 



482 DE QUINCEY 

*' Not twice had faH'n 
On those high peaks the first autumnal snow, 
Before the greedy visiting was closed, 
And the long privileg'd house left empty; swept 
As by a plague. Yet no rapacious plague 
Had been among them; all was gentle death. 
One after one, with intervals of peace." 

The aged pastor's wife, his son, one of his daughters, and " a 
little smiling grandson," all had gone within a brief series of 
days. These composed the entire household in Grasmere, (the 
others having dispersed, or married away;) and all were gone 
but himself, by very many years the oldest of the whole: he 
still survived. And the whole valley, nay, all the valleys round 
about, speculated with a tender interest upon what course the 
desolate old man would take for his support. 

"All gone, all vanished! he, deprived and bare, 
How will he face the remnant of his life; 
What will become of him? we said, and mus'd 
In sad conjectures. — Shall we meet him now, 
Haunting with rod and line the craggy brooks? 
Or shall we overhear him, as we pass, 
Striving to entertain the lonely hours 
With music? [for he had not ceas'd to touch 
The harp or viol, which himself had fram'd 
For their sweet purposes, with perfect skill.] 
What titles will he keep? Will he remain 
Musician, gardener, builder, mechanist, 
A planter, and a rearer from the seed? " 

Yes; he persevered in all his pursuits; intermitted none of 
them; weathered a winter in solitude; once more beheld the 
glories of a spring, and the resurrection of the flowers upon 
the graves of his beloved; held out even through the depths 
of summer into the cheerful season of haymaking, (a season 
much later in Westmoreland than in the south) ; took his rank, 
as heretofore, amongst the haymakers; sat down at noon for 
a little rest to his aged limbs, and found even a deeper rest than 
he was expecting; for, in a moment of time, without a warning, 
without a struggle, and without a groan, he did indeed rest 
from his labours for ever. He, 

" With his cheerful throng 
Of open projects, and his inward hoard 
Of unsunn'd griefs, too many and too keen. 
Was overcome by unexpected sleep 
In one blest moment. Like a shadow thrown. 
Softly and lightly; from a passing cloud, 
Death fell upon him, while reclined he lay 
For noontide solace on the summer grass — 
The warm lap of his mother earth; and so, 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 483 

Their lenient term of separation pass'd, 

That family — 

By yet a higher privilege — once more 
Wer^ gathered to each other." 

Two surviving members of the family, a son and a daughter. 
I knew intimately. Both have been long dead; but the chil- 
dren of the daughter — grandsons, therefore, to the patriarch 
here recorded— are living prosperously, and do honour to the 
interesting family they represent. 

The other family were, if less generally interesting by their 
characters or accomplishments, much more so by the circum- 
stances of their position; and that member of the family with 
whom accident and neighbourhood had brought me especially 
connected, was, in her intellectual capacity, probably superior 
to most of those whom I have had occasion to record. Had no 
misfortunes settled upon her life prematurely, and with the 
benefit of a little judicious guidance to her studies, I am of 
opinion that she would have been a most distinguished person. 
Her situation, when I came to know her, was one of touching 
interest. I will state the circumstances: — She was the sole 
illegitimate daughter of a country gentleman; and was a 
favourite with her father, as she well deserved to be, in a degree 
so excessive — so nearly idolatrous — that I never heard illus- 
trations of it mentioned but that secretly I trembled for the 
endurance of so perilous a love under the common accidents 
of life, and still more under the unusual difficulties and snares 
of her peculiar situation. Her father was, by birth, breeding, 
and property, a Leicestershire farmer; not, perhaps, what you 
would strictly call a gentleman, for he affected no refinements 
of manner, but rather courted the exterior of a blufif, careless 
yeornan. Still he was of that class whom all people, even then, 
on his letters, addressed as esquire: he had an ample income, 
and was surrounded with all the luxuries of modern life. In 
early life — and that was the sole palliation of his guilt — (and 
yet, again, in another view, aggravated it) — he had allowed 
himself to violate his own conscience in a way which, from the 
hour of his error, never ceased to pursue him with remorse, 

and which was, in fact, its own avenger. Mr. K was a 

favourite specimen of English yeomanly beauty: a fine athletic 
figure; and with features handsome, well moulded, frank and 
generous in their expression, and in a striking degree manly. 
In fact, he might have sat for Robin Hood. It happened that a 
young lady of his own neighbourhood, somewhere near Mount 
Soril I think, fell desperately in love with him. Oh! blindness 



484 DE QUINCEY 

of the human heart! how deeply did she come to rue the day 
when she first turned her thoughts to him! At first, however, 
her case seemed a hopeless one; for she herself was remarkably 

plain, and Mr. K was profoundly in love with the very 

handsome daughter of a neighbouring farmer. One advantage, 
however, there was on the side of this plain girl: she was rich; 
and part of her wealth, or of her expectations, lay in landed 
property, that would effect a very tempting arrondissement of 

an estate belonging to Mr. K. . Through what course the 

affair travelled, I never heard more particularly, than that 

Mr. K was besieged and worried out of his steady mind 

by the solicitations of aunts and other relations, who had all 
adopted the cause of the heiress. But what finally availed to 
extort a reluctant consent from him was, the representation 
made by the young lady's family, and backed by medical men, 

that she was seriously in danger of dying, unless Mr. K 

would make her his wife. He was no coxcomb; but, when he 
heard all his own female relations calling him a murderer, and 
taxing him with having, at times, given some encouragement 
to the unhappy lovesick girl, in an evil hour he agreed to give 
up his own sweetheart and marry her. He did so. But no 
sooner was this fatal step taken than it was repented. His love 
returned in bitter excess for the girl whom he had forsaken, 
and with frantic remorse. This girl, at length, by the mere 
force of his grief, he actually persuaded to live with him as his 
wife; and when, in spite of all concealments, the fact began to 
transpire, and the angry wife, in order to break off the con- 
nection, obtained his consent to their quitting Leicestershire 
altogether, and transferring their whole establishment to the 

Lakes, Mr. K evaded the whole object of this manoeuvre 

by secretly contriving to bring her rival also into Westmore- 
land. Her, however, he placed in another vale; and, for some 

years, it is pretty certain that Mrs. K never suspected the 

fact. Some said that it was her pride which would not allow 
her to seem conscious of so great an affront to herself; others, 
better skilled in deciphering the meaning of manners, stead- 
fastly affirmed that she was in happy ignorance of an arrange- 
ment known to all the country beside. 

Years passed on; and the situation of the poor wife became 
more and more gloomy. During those years, she brought her 
husband no children; on the other hand, her hated rival had: 

Mr. K saw growing up about his table two children, a son, 

and then a daughter, who, in their childhood, must have been 
beautiful creatures; for the son, when I knew him in after life, 



I 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 485 

though bloated and disfigured a good deal by intemperance, 
was still a very fine young man; more athletic even than his 
father ; and presenting his father's handsome English yeoman's 
face, exalted by a Roman dignity in some of the features. The 
daughter was of the same cast of person ; tall, and Roman also 
in the style of her face. In fact, the brother and the sister 
would have offered a fine impersonation of Coriolanus and 
Valeria. This Roman bias of the features a little afifected the 
feminine loveliness of the daughter's appearance. But still, as 
the impression was not very decided, she would have been 
pronounced anywhere a very captivating young woman. 

These were the two crowns of Mr. K 's felicity, that for 

seventeen or eighteen years made the very glory of his life. 
But Nemesis was on his steps; and one of these very children 
she framed the scourge Which made the day of his death a 
happy deliverance, for which he had long hungered and 
thirsted. But I anticipate. About the time when I came to 
reside in Grasmere, some little afifair of local business one night 

drew Wordsworth up to Mr. K 's house. It was called, 

and with great propriety, from the multitude of holly trees 
that still survived from ancient days, "The Hollens;" which 

pretty local name Mrs. K- , in her general spirit of vulgar 

sentimentality, had changed to Holly Grove. 

The place, spite of its slipshod novelish name, which might 
have led one to expect a corresponding style of tinsel finery, 
and a display of childish purposes, about its furniture or its 
arrangements, was really simple and unpretending; whilst its 
situation was in itself, a sufficient ground of interest; for it 
stood on a little terrace running like an artificial gallery or 
corridor along the final, and all but perpendicular, descent of 
the mighty Fairfield.' It seemed as if it must require iron bolts 
to pin it to the rock, which rose so high, and, apparently, so 
close behind. Not until you reached the little esplanade upon 
which the modest mansion stood, were you aware of a little 
area interposed between the rear of the house and the rock, 
just sufficient for ordinary domestic offices. The house was 
otherwise interesting to myself, from recalling one in which 
I had passed part of my infancy. As in that, you entered by 
a rustic hall, fitted up so as to make a beautiful little breakfast- 
ing-room: the distribution of the passages was pretty nearly 

the same; and there were other resemblances. Mr. K 

received us with civility and hospitality — checked, however, 
and embarrassed, by a very evident reserve. The reason of 
this was, partly, that he distrusted the feelings, towards him- 



486 DE QUINCEY 

self, of two scholars; but more, perhaps, that he had something 
beyond this general jealousy for distrusting Wordsworth. He 
had been a very extensive planter of larches, which were then 
recently introduced into the Lake country; and were, in every 
direction, displacing the native forest scenery, and dismally 
disfiguring this most lovely region; and this effect was neces- 
sarily in its worst excess during the infancy of the larch planta- 
tions; both because they took the formal arrangement of 
nursery grounds, until extensive thinnings, as well as storms, 
had begun to break this hideous stiffness in the lines and 
angles, and also because the larch is a mean tree, both in form 
and colouring, (having a bright gosling glare in spring, a wet 
blanket hue in autumn,) as long as it continues a young tree. 
Not until it has seen forty or fifty winters does it begin to 
toss its boughs about with a wild Alpine grace. Wordsworth, 
for many years, had systematically abused the larches and the 
larch planters; and there went about the country a pleasant 
anecdote, in connection with this well-known habit of his, which 
I have often heard repeated by the woodmen — viz. that, one 
day, when he believed himself to be quite alone — but was, in 
fact, surveyed coolly, during the whole process of his passions, 
by a reposing band of labourers in the shade, and at their noon- 
tide meal — Wordsworth, on finding a whole cluster of birch- 
trees grubbed up, and preparations making for the installation 
of larches in their place, was seen advancing to the spot with 
gathering wrath in his eyes ; next he was heard pouring out an 
interrupted litany of comminations and maledictions; and, 
finally, as his eye rested upon the four or five larches which 
were already beginning to ** dress the line " of the new battal- 
ion he seized his own hat in a transport of fury, and launched it 

against the odious intruders. Mr. K had, doubtless, 

heard of Wordsworth's frankness upon this theme, and knew 
himself to be, as respected Grasmere, the sole offender. 

In another way, also he had earned a few random shots 
from Wordsworth's wrath — viz. as the erector of a huge 
unsightly barn, built solely for convenience, and so far violating 
all the modesty of rustic proportions, that it was really an eye- 
sore in the valley. These considerations, and others beside, 
made him reserved; but he felt the silent appeal to his lares 
from the strangers' presence, and was even kind in his court- 
esies. Suddenly, Mrs. K entered the room — instantly 

his smile died away: he did not even mention her name. 
Wordsworth, however, she knew slightly; and to me she intro- 
duced herself. Mr. K seemed almost impatient when I 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 4^7 

rose and presented her with my chair. Any^ingAat detained 
her in the room for a needless moment seemed to h.m a nui- 
sance She, on the other hand - what was her behaviour? I 
had been to d that she worshipped the very ground on which 
he trod and so, indeed, it appeared. This adoring love might, 
under other circumstances, have been beautiful to contemplate; 
but here irimpressed unmixed disgust Imagine a woman c,f 
verv homely features, and farther disfigured by a scorbutic 
eruotion fixig a tender gaze upon a burly man of forty, who 
shov^ed by evf ry word, look, gesture, movement, that he dis- 
dS her In fact, nothing could be more injudicious than 
her deportment towards him. Everybody must feel that a 
man who hates any person, hates that person the more for 
^roubhng him with expressions of love; or, at least, it adds to 
hatred the dng of disgust. That was the fixed language of 
Mr K— 's nfanner, in relation to his wife. He was not a 
mint be pleased with foolish fondling endearments from any 
woman, before strangers; but from her! Faugh! he said 
h^ternalv at every instant. His very eyes he averted from her. 
not once did he look at her, though forced into the odious 
necessity of speaking to her several times; and,, at length, when 
she seemed disposed to construe our presence as a sort of 
bHef pXilege to her own, he adopted that same artifice for 
Hdd n^g hims^elf of her detested company, which has sometimes 
done seasonable service to a fine gentleman when called upon 
bv ladies for the explanation of a Greek word -he hinted to 
her pre tv broadly, that the subject of our conversation was 
^Jot'ahogeAer proper for female ears; very much to the aston- 
ishment of Wordsworth and myself. 

Notes 

tion, but by an instantaneous flash. afterwards raised 

2 And. in allusion to this circumstance, the ^OH^^. ^"<^^^,'^^^ received 

on fneighbouring spot, at this time suggested by Miss Smith, receivea 

the name of Tent Lodge. 

» " And Mighty Fairfield, with her chime 

Of echoes, still was keepmg^t™e_^^^,^ « Waoookbr." 



488 DE QUINCEY 

I have retained the English name of Fairfield; but, when I was 
studying Danish, I stumbled upon the true meaning of the name, 
unlocked by that language; and reciprocally (as one amongst other 
instances which I met at the very threshold of my studies) unlocking 
the fact that Danish (or Icelandic rather) is the master-key to the 
local names and dialect of Westmoreland. " Faar " is a sheep: " fald " 
a hill. But are not all the hills sheep hills? No; Fairfield only amongst 
all its neighbours, has large, smooth, pastoral savannas, to which the 
sheep resort when all the rocky or barren neighbours are left desolate. 



Ill 

IT was at Mr. Wordsworth's house that I first became 
acquainted with Professor (then Mr.) Wilson, of Elleray. 
I have elsewhere described the impression which he made 
upon me at my first acquaintance; and it is sufficiently 
known, from other accounts of Mr. Wilson, (as, for example, 
that written by Mr. Lockhart in *' Peter's Letters,") that he 
divided his time and the utmost sincerity of his love between 
literature and the stormiest pleasures of real life. Cock-fight- 
ing, wrestling, pugilistic contests, boat-racing, horse-racing, 
all enjoyed Mr. Wilson's patronage; all were occasionally hon- 
oured by his personal participation. I mention this in no 
unfriendly spirit toward Professor Wilson; on the contrary, 
these propensities grew out of his ardent temperament and 
his constitutional endowments — his strength, speed, and 
agility: and being confined' to the period of youth — for I am 
speaking of a period removed by five-and-twenty years — can 
do him no dishonour amongst the candid and the judicious. 
*' Non lusisse pudet, sed non incidere ludum." The truth was, 
that Professor Wilson had in him, at that period of life, some- 
thing of the old English chivalric feeling which our old ballad 
poetry agrees in ascribing to Robin Hood. Several men of 
genius have expressed to me, at different times, the delight 
they had in the traditional character of Robin Hood: he has 
no resemblance to the old heroes of Continental romance in 
one important feature ; they are uniformly victorious : and this 
gives even a tone of monotony to the Continental poems : for, 
let them involve their hero in what dangers they may, the 
reader still feels them to be as illusory as those which menace 
an enchanter — an Astolpho, for instance, who, by one blast 
of his horn, can dissipate an army of opponents. But Robin 
is frequently beaten: he never declines a challenge; sometimes 
he courts one; and occasionally he learns a lesson from some 
proud tinker or masterful beggar, the moral of which teaches 
him that there are better men in the world than himself. What 
follows? Is the brave man angry with his stout-hearted antag- 
onist, because he is no less brave and a little stronger than 
himself? Not at all; he insists on making him a present, on giv- 

489 



490 DE QUINCEY 

ing him a dejeuner a la fourchette, and (in case he is disposed 
to take service in the forest) finally adopts him into his band 
of archers. Much the same spirit governed, in his earlier 
years, Professor Wilson. And, although a man of prudence 
cannot altogether approve of his throwing himself into the 
convivial society of gipsies, tinkers, potters,^ strolling players, 
etc. ; nevertheless, it tells altogether in favour of Professor Wil- 
son's generosity of mind, that he was ever ready to forego his 
advantages of station and birth, and to throw himself fearlessly 
upon his own native powers, as man opposed to man. Even 
at Oxford he fought an aspiring shoemaker repeatedly, which 
is creditable to both sides; for the very prestige of the gown 
is already overpowering to the artisan from the beginning, and 
he is half beaten by terror at his own presumption. Else- 
where he sought out, or, at least did not avoid the most dreaded 
of the local heroes; and fought his way through his "most 
verdant years," taking or giving defiances to the right and the 
left in perfect carelessness, as chance or occasion offered. No 
man could well show more generosity in these struggles, nor 
more magnanimity in reporting their issue, which naturally 
went many times against him. But Mr. Wilson neither sought 
to disguise the issue nor showed himself at all displeased with 
it: even brutal ill-usage did not seem to have left any vindictive 
remembrance of itself. These features of his character, how- 
ever, and these propensities which naturally belonged merely 
to the transitional state from boyhood to manhood, would have 
drawn little attention on their account, had they not been 
relieved and emphatically contrasted by his passion for litera- 
ture, and the fluent command which he soon showed over a 
rich and voluptuous poetic diction. In everything Mr. Wilson 
showed himself an Athenian. Athenians were all lovers of the 
cockpit; and, howsoever shocking to the sensibilities of modern 
refinement, we have no doubt that Plato was a frequent better 
at cock-fights; and Socrates is known to have bred cocks him- 
self. If there were any Athenian, however, in particular, it 
was Alcibiades; for he had his marvellous versatility; and to 
the Windermere neighbourhood in which he had settled, this 
versatility came recommended by something of the very same 
position in society — the same wealth, the same social temper, 
the same jovial hospitality. No person was better fitted to 
win or to maintain a high place in social esteem ; for he could 
adapt himself to all companies ; and the wish to conciliate and 
to win his way by flattering the self-love of others was so pre- 
dominant over all personal self-love and vanity 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 49 1 

" That he did in the general bosom reign 
Of young and old." 

Mr. Wilson and most of his family I had already known for 
six years. We had projected journeys together through Spain 
and Greece, all of which had been nipped in the bud by 
Napoleon's furious and barbarous mode of making war. It 
was no joke, as it had been in past times, for an Englishman 
to be found wandering in continental regions; the pretence 
that he was, or might be, a spy — a charge so easy to make, 
so impossible to throw off — at once sufficed for the hanging 
of the unhappy traveller. In one of his Spanish bulletins, 
Napoleon even boasted^ of having hanged sixteen Englishmen, 
'' merchants or others of that nation," whom he taxed with no 
suspicion even of being suspected, beyond the simple fact of 
being detected in the act of breathing Spanish air. These 
atrocities had interrupted our continental schemes; and we 
were thus led the more to roam amongst home scenes. How 
it happened I know not — for we had wandered together often 
in England — but, by some accident, it was not until 18 14 that 
we visited Edinburgh together. Then it was that I first saw 
Scotland. 

I remember a singular incident which befell us on the road. 
Breakfasting together, before starting, at Mr. Wilson's place 
of Elleray, we had roamed, through a long and delightful day, 
by way of Ulleswater, etc. Reaching Penrith at night, we 
slept there; and in the morning, as we were sunning ourselves 
in the street, we saw, seated in an arm-chair, and dedicating 
himself to the self-same task of apricating his jolly personage, 
a rosy, jovial, portly man, having something of the air of a 
Quaker. Good nature was clearly his predominating quality; 
and, as that happened to be our foible also, we soon fell into 
talk ; and from that into reciprocations of good-will ; and from 
those into a direct proposal, on our new friend's part, that we 
should set out upon our travels together. How — whither — 
to what end or object — seemed as little to enter into his specu- 
lations at the cost of realizing them. Rare it is, in this business 
world of ours, to find any man in so absolute a state of indif- 
ference and neutrality, that for him all quarters of the globe, 
and all points of the compass, are self-balanced by philosophic 
equilibrium of choice. There seemed to us something amus- 
ing and yet monstrous in such a man; and, perhaps, had we 
been in the same condition of exquisite indetermination, to 
this hour we might all have been staying together at Penrith. 
We, however, were previously bound to Edinburgh; and, as 



492 DE QUINCEY 

soon as this was explained to him, that way, he proposed to 
accompany us. We took a chaise, therefore, jointly to Car- 
lisle; and, during the whole eighteen miles, he astonished us 
by the wildest and most frantic displays of erudition, much of 
it levelled at Sir Isaac Newton. Much philosophical learning 
also he exhibited; but the grotesque accompaniment of the 
whole was, that, after every bravura, he fell back into his cor- 
ner in fits of laughter at himself. We began to find out the 
unhappy solution of his indifference and purposeless condition ; 
he was a lunatic; and, afterwards, we had reason to suppose 
that he was now a fugitive from his keepers. At Carlisle he 
became restless and suspicious ; and, finally, upon some real or 
imaginary business, he turned aside to Whitehaven. We were 
not the objects of his jealousy; for he parted with us reluctantly 
and anxiously. On our part, we felt our pleasure overcast by 
sadness; for we had been much amused by his conversation, 
and could not but respect the philological learning which he 
had displayed. But one thing was whimsical enough ; Wilson 
purposely said some startling things — startling in point of 
decorum, or gay pleasantries, contra bonos mores; at every 
sally of which, he looked as awfully shocked as though he 
himself had not been holding the most licentious talk in 
another key, licentious as respected all truth of history or of 
science. Another illustration, in fact, he furnished of what I 
have so often heard Coleridge say — that lunatics, in general, 
so far from being the brilliant persons they are thought, and 
having a preternatural brightness of fancy, usually are the very 
dullest and most uninspired of mortals. The sequel of our 
poor friend's history — for the apparent goodness of his nature 
had interested us both in his fortunes, and caused us to inquire 
after him through all probable channels — was, that he was 
last seen by a Cambridge man of our acquaintance, but under 
circumstances which confirmed our worst fears: it was in a 
stage-coach ; and, at first, the Cantab suspected nothing amiss ; 
but some accident of conversation being started, the topic of 
La Place's " Mechanique Celeste," off flew our jolly Penrith 
friend in a tirade against Sir Isaac Newton; so that at once we 
recognized him, as the *' Vicar of Wakefield," his " cosmogony 
friend" in prison; but — and that was melancholy to hear — 
this tirade was suddenly checked, in the rudest manner, by a 
brutal fellow in one corner of the carriage, who, as it now 
appeared, was attending him as a regular keeper; and, accord- 
ing to the custom of such people, always laid an interdict upon 
every ebullition of fancy or animated thought. He was a 







^COTTAGE AT LASS WADE, NEAR EDINBURGH, 

Last residence of Thomas De Qui?icey. 

Photogravure from a drawing after an old engraving. 



wton. Much pi 
_ ..le grotesque acc„... 
every bravura, he fell b? 
"^ '^•■^-self. We bc'--^' 
rence and pi 
ards, we had rci 
>m his keeners. 



iutl to 

At Cai 



not the objects of his jealousy; for he parted with us reluctantly 
and anxiously. On our part, we felt our pleasure overcast by 
sadness; for we had been much amused by his conversation, 

M not b-^ " - - ^'- '''^' 






■ry 



lier key, hcentious as respected all truth of history or of 

-" Another illustration, in fact, he furnished of what I 

)ften heard Coleridge say — that lunatics, in general, 

' ' - ' -■^'- nt persons they are th ' ' -^^^ 

ess of fancv. usually 



DUL some a» 
La Place's ' 

a tirade 

.d him, :. 
( u.nd ' in prison; bi 
this tirade was suddt 
brutal fellow in one 
appeared, was attend 
ing to the custom of 
every ebullition of fane^ 



lie tuple ol 

)lly Penrith 
; iu tliat at < 
\" his ** cos 

holy to heai — 
st manner, by 
i^e, who, as it n 
... keeper; and, nr< 
s laid an interd 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 493 

man whose mind had got some wheel entangled, or some 
spring overloaded, but else, was a learned and able person; 
and he was to be silent at the bidding of a low, brutal fellow, 
incapable of distinguishing between the gayeties of fancy and 
the wandering of the intellect. Sad fate! and sad inversion of 
the natural relations between the accomplished scholar and 
the rude illiterate boor! 

Of Edinburgh I thought to have spoken at length. But I 
pause, and retreat from the subject, when I remember that so 
many of those whom I loved and honoured at that time — some, 
too, among the gayest of the gay — are now lying in their 
graves. Of Professor Wilson's sisters, the youngest, at that 
time a child almost, and standing at the very vestibule of 
womanhood, is alone living; she has had a romantic life; has 
twice traversed, with no attendance but her servants, the 
gloomy regions of the Caucasus; and once with a young child 
by her side. Her husband, Mr. M'Neill, is now the English 
Envoy at the court of Teheran. On the rest, one of whom I 
honoured and loved as a sister, the curtain has fallen ; and here, 
in the present mood of my spirits, I also feel disposed to drop 
a curtain over my subsequent memoirs. Farewell, hallowed 
recollections ! 

Thus, I have sketched the condition of the Lake District, as 
to society of an intellectual order, at the time, (viz. the winter 
of 1808-9,) when I became a personal resident in that district; 
and, indeed, from this era, through a period of about twenty 
years in succession, I may describe my domicile as being 
amongst the lakes and mountains of Westmoreland. It is true, 
I often made excursions to London, Bath, and its neighbour- 
hood, or northwards to Edinburgh ; and, perhaps, on an aver- 
age, passed one-fourth part of each year at a distance from this 
district ; but here only it was that hencef orwards I had a house 
and small establishment. The house, for a very long course 
of years, was that same cottage in Grasmere, embowered in 
roses and jessamine, which I have already described as a spot 
hallowed to the admirers of Mr. Wordsworth by his seven 
years' occupation of its pretty chambers and its rocky orchard : 
a little domain, which he has himself apostrophized as the 
" lowest stair in that magnificent temple," forming the north- 
eastern boundary of Grasmere. The little orchard is rightly 
called ''the lowest stair;" for within itself, all is ascending 
ground; hardly enough of flat area on which to pitch a pavil- 
ion, and even that scanty surface an inclined plane; whilst 
the rest of the valley, into which you step immediately from the 



494 ^^ QUINCEY 

garden gate, is (according to the characteristic beauty of the 
northern EngHsh valleys, as first noticed by Mr. Wordsworth 
himself) " flat as the floor of a temple." 

In sketching the state of the Hterary society gathered or 
gathering about the English Lakes, at the time of my settling 
amongst them, I have of course authorized the reader to sup- 
pose that I personally mixed freely amongst the whole; else 
I should have had neither the means for describing that society 
with truth, nor any motive for attempting it. Meantime, the 
direct object of my own residence at the lakes was the society 
of Mr. Wordsworth. And it will be a natural inference that, 
if I mingled on familiar or friendly terms with this society, 
a fortiori would Mr. Wordsworth do so, as belonging to the 
Lake District by birth, and as having been, in some instances, 
my own introducer to members of this community. But it was 
not so; and never was a grosser blunder committed than by 
Lord Byron, when in a letter to Mr. Hogg, (from which an 
extract is given in some volume of Mr. Lockhart's ** Life of 
Sir Walter Scott,") he speaks of Wordsworth, Southey, etc., in 
connection with Sir Walter, as all alike injured by mixing only 
with little adoring coteries, which each severally was supposed 
to have gathered about himself as a centre. Now, had this 
really been the case, I know not how the objects of such a 
partial or exclusive admiration could have been injured by it 
in any sense with which the public were concerned. A writer 
may — and of that there are many instances — write the worse 
for meeting nobody of sympathy with himself; no admiration 
sufficient to convince him that he has written powerfully; that 
misfortune, when it occurs, may injure a writer, or may cause 
him to cease cultivating his genius. But no man was ever 
injured by the strong reflection of his own power in love and 
admiration; not as a writer, I mean: though it is very true, 
from the great variety of modes in which praise, or the indirect 
flattery of silent homage, acts upon different minds, that some 
men may be injured as social companions: vanity, and, still 
more, egotism — the habit of making self the central point 
of reference, in every treatment of every subject — may cer- 
tainly be cherished by the idolatry of a private circle, continu- 
ally ascending; but arrogance and gloomy anti-social pride are 
qualities much more likely to be favoured by sympathy with- 
held, and the unjust denial of a man's pretensions. This, how- 
ever, need not be discussed with any reference to Mr. Words- 
worth; for he had no such admiring circle: no applauding 
coterie ever gathered about him. Wordsworth was not a 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 495 

man to be openly flattered; his pride repelled that kind of 
homage, or any homage that offered itself with the air of 
conferring honour; and repelled it in a tone of loftiness or arro- 
gance that never failed to kindle the pride of the baffled flat- 
terer. Nothing in the way of applause could give Wordsworth 
any pleasure, unless it were the spontaneous and half-uncon- 
scious utterance of delight in some passage — the implicit 
applause of love, half afraid to express itself; or else the delib- 
erate praise of rational examination, study, and comparison, 
applied to his writings: these were the only modes of admira- 
tion which could recommend themselves to Wordsworth. But 
had it been otherwise, there was another mistake in what Lord 
Byron said : — the neighbouring people in every degree, '' gen- 
tle and simple," literary or half-educated, who had heard of 
Wordsworth, agreed in despising him. Never had poet or 
prophet less honour in his own country. Of the gentry, very 
few knew anything about Wordsworth. Grasmere was a vale 
little visited at that time, except for an hour's admiration. The 
case is now altered; and partly by a new road, which, having 
pierced the valley by a line carried along the water's edge, at a 
most preposterous cost, and with a large area of debt for the 
next generation, saves the labour of surmounting a labourious 
hill. The case is now altered no less for the intellect of the age; 
and Rydal Mount is now one of the most honoured abodes in 
the island. But, at that time, Grasmere did not differ more 
from the Grasmere of to-day than Wordsworth from the 
Wordsworth of 1809-20. I repeat that he was little known, 
even as a resident in the country; and, as a poet, strange it 
would have been had the little tovm of Ambleside undertaken 
to judge for itself, and against a tribunal which had for a time 
subdued the very temper of the age. Lord Byron might have 
been sure that nowhere would the contempt for Mr. Words- 
worth be rifer than exactly amongst those who had a local 
reason for curiosity about the man, and who, of course, adopt- 
ing the tone of the presiding journals, adopted them with a 
personality of feeling unknown elsewhere. 

Except, therefore, with the Lloyds, or occasionally with 
Thomas Wilkinson the Quaker, or very rarely with Southey, 
Wordsworth had no intercourse at all beyond the limits of 
Grasmere: and in that valley I was myself, for some years, his 
sole visiting friend; as, on the other hand, my sole visitors as 
regarded that vale, were himself and his family. 

Among that family, and standing forth in the series of his 
children, was a little girl, whose life, short as it was, and whose 



496 DE QUINCEY 

death, obscure and little heard of as it was amongst all the 
rest of the world, connected themselves with the records of my 
own life by ties of passion so profound, by a grief so frantic, 
and so memorable through the injurious effects which it pro- 
duced of a physical kind, that, had I left untouched every other 
chapter of my own experience, I should certainly have left 
behind some memorandum of this, as having a permanent 
interest in the psychological history of human nature. Luck- 
ily the facts are not without a parallel, and in well authenti- 
cated medical books; else I should have scrupled, (as what 
man does not scruple who values, above all things, the reputa- 
tion for veracity?) to throw the whole stress of credibility on my 
own unattached narration. But all experienced physicians 
know well that cases similar to mine, though not common, 
occur at intervals in every large community. 

When I first settled in Grasmere, Catherine Wordsworth was 
in her infancy; but, even at that age, noticed me more than any 
other person, excepting, of course, her mother. She had for 
an attendant a young girl, perhaps thirteen years old — Sarah, 
one of the orphan children left by the unfortunate couple, 
George and Sarah Green, whose tragical end in a snow-storm I 
have already narrated. This Sarah Green was as far removed- 
in character as could be imagined from that elder sister who 
had won so much admiration in her childish days, by her pre- 
mature display of energy and household virtues. She was 
lazy, luxurious, and sensual : one, in fact, of those nurses who, 
in their anxiety to gossip about young men, leave their infant 
or youthful charges to the protection of chance. It was, how- 
ever, not in her out-of-door ramblings, but at home, that the 
accident occurred which determined the fortunes of little 
Catherine. Mr. Coleridge was, at that time, a visitor to the 
Wordsworths at Allan Bank, that house in Grasmere to which 
Wordsworth had removed upon quitting his cottage. One day 
about noon, when, perhaps, he was coming down to breakfast, 
Mr. Coleridge passed Sarah Green, playing after her indolent 
fashion with the child; and between them lay a number of 
carrots. He warned the girl that raw carrots were an indiges- 
tible substance for the stomach of an infant. This warning 
was neglected : little Catherine ate — it was never known how 
many ; and, in a short time, was seized with strong convulsions. 
I saw her in this state about two p. m. No medical aid was 
to be had nearer than Ambleside; about six miles distant. 
However, all proper measures were taken; and, by sunset^ she 
had so far recovered as to be pronounced out of danger. Her 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 497 

left side, however, left arm, and left leg, from that time forward, 
were in a disabled state: not what could be called paralyzed, 
but suffering a sort of atony or imperfect distribution of vital 
power. Catherine was not above three years old when she 
died; so that there could not have been much room for the 
expansion of her understanding, or the unfolding of her real 
character. But there was room enough in her short life, and 
too much, for love the most frantic to settle upon her. The 
whole vale of Grasmere is not large enough to allow of any 
great distances between house and house; and as it happened 
that little Kate Wordsworth returned my love, she in a man- 
ner lived with me at my solitary cottage; as often as I could 
entice her from home, walked with me, slept with me, and was 
my sole companion. That I was not singular in describing 
some witchery to the nature and manners of this innocent 
child, you may gather from the following most beautiful lines 
extracted from a sketch towards her portraiture, drawn by her 
father, (with whom, however, she was noways a favourite) : 

" And as a faggot sparkles on the hearth, 

Not less if unattended and alone 

Than when both young and old sit gather'd round, 

And take delight in its activity; 

Even so this happy creature of herself 

Was all sufficient: Solitude to her 

Was blithe society, who fill'd the air 

With gladness and involuntary songs. 

Light were her sallies as the tripping fawn's, 

Forth startled from the form where she lay couch'd; 

Unthought of, unexpected, as the stir 

Of the soft breeze ruffling the meadow flowers; 

Or from before it chasing wantonly 

The many-colour'd images impress'd 

Upon the bosom of a placid lake." 

It was this radiant spirit of joyousness, making solitude for 
her blithe society, and filling from morning to night the air 
" with gladness and involuntary songs," this it was which so 
fascinated my heart, that I became blindly, doatingly, in a ser- 
vile degree, devoted to this one affection. 

In the spring of 1812, I went up to London; and, early in 
June, by a letter from Miss Wordsworth, her aunt, I learned 
the terrific news, (for such to me it was,) that she had died 
suddenly. She had gone to bed in good health about sunset 
on June 4th; was found speechless a little before midnight; 
and died in the early dawn, just as the first gleams of morning 
began to appear above Seat Sandel and Fairfield, the mightiest 
of the Grasmere barriers, about an hour, perhaps, before sun- 
32 



498 DE QUINCEY 

rise. Never, perhaps, from the foundations of those mighty 
hills, was there so fierce a convulsion of grief as mastered my 
faculties on receiving that heart-shattering news. Over and 
above my excess of love for her, I had always viewed her as an 
impersonation of the dawn and the spirit of infancy; and this 
abstraction seated in her person, together with the visionary 
sort of connection, which, even in her parting hours, she 
assumed with the summer sun, by timing her immersion into 
the cloud of death with the rising and setting of that fountain 
of life — these combined impressions recoiled so violently into 
a contrast or polar antithesis to the image of death, that each 
exalted and brightened the other. I returned hastily to Gras- 
mere ; stretched myself every night, for more than two months 
running, upon her grave ; in fact, often passed the night upon 
her grave; not (as may readily be supposed) in any parade of 
grief; on the contrary, in that quiet valley of simple shepherds, 
I was secure enough from observation until morning light 
began to return ; but in mere intensity of sick, frantic yearning 
after neighbourhood to the darling of my heart. 

Many readers will have seen in Sir Walter Scott's " Demono- 
logy," and in Dr. Abercrombie's " Inquiries Concerning the 
Intellectual Powers," some remarkable illustrations of the cre- 
ative faculties awakened in the eye or other organs by peculiar 
states of passion ; and it is worthy of a place amongst cases of 
that nature, that, in many solitary fields, at a considerable ele- 
vation above the level of the valleys — fields which, in the local 
dialect, are called " intacks," — my eye was haunted at times, in 
broad noonday, (oftener, however, in the afternoon,) with a 
facility, but at times also with a necessity, for weaving, out of a 
few simple elements, a perfect picture of little Kate in the 
attitude and onward motion of walking. I resorted constantly 
to these " intacks," as places where I was little liable to disturb- 
ance; and usually I saw her at the opposite side of the field, 
which might sometimes be at a distance of a quarter of a mile, 
generally not so much. Always almost she carried a basket on 
her head; and usually the first hint upon which the figure arose 
commenced in wild plants, such as tall ferns, or the purple 
flowers of the foxglove; but, whatever might be the colours or 
the forms, uniformly the same little full-formed figure arose, 
uniformly dressed in the little blue bed-gown and black skirt of 
Westmoreland, and uniformly with the air of advancing 
motion. Through part of June, July, and part of August, in 
fact throughout the summer, this frenzy of grief continued. 
It was reasonably to be expected that nature would avenge 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 499 

such senseless self-surrender to passion; for, in fact, so far from 
making an effort to resist it, I clung to it as a luxury, (which, in 
the midst of suffering, it really was in part.) All at once, on a 
day at the latter end of August, in one instant of time, I was 
seized with some nervous sensation that, for a moment, 
caused sickness. A glass of brandy removed the sickness; but 
I felt, to my horror, a sting as it were, of some stationary tor- 
ment left behind — a torment absolutely indescribable, but 
under which I felt assured that life could not be borne. It is 
useless and impossible to describe what followed, with no 
apparent illness discoverable to any medical eye — looking, 
indeed, better than usual for three months and upwards, I was 
under the possession of some internal nervous malady, that 
made each respiration which I drew an act of separate anguish. 
I travelled southwards immediately to Liverpool, to Birming- 
ham, to Bristol, to Bath, for medical advice; and finally rested 
— in a gloomy state of despair, rather because I saw no use in 
further change, than that I looked for any change in this place 
more than others — at Clifton, near Bristol. Here it was, at 
length, in the course of November, that, in one hour, my mal- 
ady began to leave me : it was not quite so abrupt, however, in 
its departure, as in its first development: a peculiar sensation 
arose from the knee downwards, about midnight: it went for- 
wards through a space of about five hours, and then stopped, 
leaving me perfectly free from every trace of the awful malady 
which had possessed me; but so much debilitated as with diffi- 
culty to stand or walk. Going down soon after this, to Ilfra- 
combe, in Devonshire, where there were hot sea baths, I found 
it easy enough to restore my shattered strength. But the 
remarkable fact in this cat..^trophe of my illness is, that all grief 
for little Kate Wordsworth, nay, all remembrance of her, had, 
with my malady, vanished from my mind. The traces of her 
innocent features were utterly washed away from my heart : she 
might have been dead for a thousand years, so entirely abol- 
ished was the last lingering image of her face or figure. The 
little memorials of her which her mother had given to me, as in 
particular, a pair of her red morocco shoes, won not a sigh 
from me as I looked at them : even her little grassy grave, white 
with snow, when I returned to Grasmere in January, 181 3, was 
looked at almost with indifference; except, indeed, as now 
become a memorial to me of that dire internal physical convul- 
sion thence arising, by which I had been shaken and wrenched; 
and, in short, a case more entirely realizing the old Pagan 
superstition of a nympholepsy in the first place, and, secondly, 



500 DE QUINCEY 

of a Lethe or river of oblivion, and the possibility, by one 
draught from this potent stream, of applying an everlasting 
ablution to all the soils and stains of human anguish, I do not 
suppose the psychological history of man affords. 

From the Lakes, as I have mentioned before, I went annually 
southwards — chiefly to Somersetshire or to London, and more 
rarely to Edinburgh. In my Somersetshire visits, I never 
failed to see Mrs. Hannah More. My own relative's house, in 
fact, standing within one mile of Barley Wood, I seldom suf- 
fered a week to pass without calling to pay my respects. There 
was a stronger motive to this than simply what arose from 
Mrs. H. More's company, or even from that of her sisters, 
(one or two of whom were more entertaining because more 
filled with animal spirits and less thoughtful than Mrs. 
Hannah;) for it rarely happened that one called within the 
privileged calling hours, which, with these rural ladies, ranged 
between twelve and four o'clock, but one met some person 
interesting by rank, station, political or literary eminence. 

Here, accordingly, it was, that, during one of my last visits 
to Somersetshire, either in 1813 or 1814, I met Mrs. Siddons, 
whom I had often seen upon the stage, but never before in 
private society. She had come into this part of the country 
chiefly, I should imagine, with a view to the medical advice at 
the Bristol Hot Wells and Clifton; for it happened that one 
of her daughters — a fine interesting young woman — was suf- 
fering under pulmonary consumption — that scourge of the 
British youth; of which malady, I believe, she ultimately died. 
From the Hot Wells, Mrs. Siddons had been persuaded to 
honour with her company a certain Dr. Wh — , whose splendid 
villa of Mendip Lodge stood about two miles from Barley 
Wood. This villa, by the way, was a show place, in which a 
vast deal of money had been sunk, upon two follies equally 
unproductive of pleasure to the beholder and of anything 
approaching a pecuniary compensation to the owner. The 
villa, with its embellishments, was supposed to have cost at 
least sixty thousand pounds; of which one-half had been 
absorbed, partly by a contest with the natural obstacles of the 
situation, and partly by the frailest of all ornaments — vast 
china jars, vases, and other " knicknackery " baubles, which 
held their very existence by so frail a tenure as the carefulness 
of a housemaid; and which, at all events, if they should sur- 
vive the accidents of life, never are known to reproduce to the 
possessor one-tenth part of what they have cost. Out of doors 
there were terraces of a mile long, one rising above another, 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 50I 

and carried, by mere artifice of mechanical skill, along the 
perpendicular face of a lofty rock. Had they, when finished, 
any particular beauty? Not at all. Considered as a pleasure 
ground, they formed a far less delightful landscape, and a far 
less alluring haunt to rambling steps, than most of the uncostly 
shrubberies which were seen below, in unpretending situations, 
and upon the ordinary level of the vale. What a record of 
human imbecility! For all his pains and his expense in form- 
ing this costly ''folly," his reward was daily anxiety, and one 
solitary bon mot which he used to record of some man, who, on 
being asked by the Rev. Doctor what he thought of his place, 
replied, that " He thought the Devil had tempted him up to an 
exceedingly high place." No part of the grounds, nor the 
house itself, was at all the better because, originally, it had 
been, beyond measure, difficult to form it: so difficult that, 
according to Dr. Johnson's witty remark, on another occasion, 
there was good reason for wishing that it had been impossible. 
The owner, whom I knew, most certainly never enjoyed a 
happy day in this costly creation ; which, after all, displayed but 
little taste, though a gorgeous array of finery. The show part 
of the house was itself a monument to the barrenness of inven- 
tion in him who planned it; consisting, as it did, of one long 
suite of rooms in a straight line, without variety, without obvi- 
ous parts, and therefore without symmetry or proportions. 
This long vista was so managed that, by means of folding- 
doors, the whole could be seen at a glance, whilst its extent 
was magnified by a vast mirror at the further end. The Doctor 
was a querulous old man, enormously tall and enormously 
bilious; so that he had a spectral appearance when pacing 
through the false gayeties of his glittering villa. He was a 
man of letters, and had known Dr. Johnson, whom he admired 
prodigiously; and had himself been, in earlier days, the author 
of a poem now forgotten. He belonged, at one period, to the 
coterie of Miss Seward, Dr. Darwin, Day, Mr. Edgeworth, 
etc. ; consequently he might have been an agreeable companion, 
having so much anecdote at his command: but his extreme 
biliousness made him irritable in a painful degree, and impati- 
ent of contradiction — impatient even of dissent in the most 
moderate shape. The latter stage of his life is worth recording, 
as a melancholy comment upon the blindness of human fore- 
sight, and in some degree also as a lesson on the disappoint- 
ments which follow any departure from high principle, and the 
deception which seldom fails to lie in ambush for the deceiver. 
I had one day taken the liberty to ask him why, and with 



502 DE QUINCEY 

what ultimate purpose, he who did not like trouble and anxiety, 
had embarrassed himself w4th the planning and construction 
of a villa that manifestly embittered his days? "That is, my 
young friend," replied the doctor, " speaking plainly, you mean 
to express your wonder that I, so old a man, (for he was then 
not far from seventy,) should spend my time in creating a 
show-box. Well now, I will tell you: precisely because I am 
old. I am naturally of a gloomy turn; and it has always struck 
me that we English, who are constitutionally haunted by mel- 
ancholy, are too apt to encourage it by the gloomy air of the 
mansions we inhabit. Your fortunate age, my friend, can 
dispense with such aids: ours require continual influxes of 
pleasure through the senses, in order to cheat the stealthy 
advances of old age, and to beguile us of our sadness. Gayety, 
the riant style in everything, that is what we old men need. 
And I, who do not love the pains of creating, love the creation; 
and, in fact, require it as part of my artillery against time." 

Such was the amount of his explanation: and now, in a few 
words, for his subsequent history. Finding himself involved in 
difficulties by the expenses of this villa going on concurrently 
with a large London establishment, he looked out for a good 
marriage, (being a widower,) as the sole means, within his 
reach, for clearing off his embarrassments, without proportion- 
able curtailment of his expenses. It happened, unhappily for 
both parties, that he fell in with a widow lady, who was cruising 
about the world with precisely the same views, and in precisely 
the same difficulties. Each (or the friends of each) held out a 
false flag, magnifying their incomes respectively, and sinking 
the embarrassments. Mutually deceived, they married: and 
one change immediately introduced at the splendid villa was, 
the occupation of an entire wing by a lunatic brother of the 
lady's; the care of whom, with a large allowance, had been 
committed to her by the Court of Chancery. This of itself, 
shed a gloom over the place which defeated the primary pur- 
pose of the doctor (as explained by himself) in erecting it. 
Windows barred, maniacal howls, gloomy attendants, from a 
lunatic hospital, ranging about : these were sad disturbances to 
the doctor's rose-leaf system of life. This, however, if it were 
a nuisance, brought along with it some solatium, as the law- 
yers expressed it, in the shape of the Chancery allowance. 
But next came the load of debts for which there was no sola- 
tium, and which turned out to be the only sort of possession 
with which the lady was well endowed. The disconsolate 
doctor — an old man, and a clergyman of the establishment — ' 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 503 

could not resort to such redress as a layman might have 
adopted: he was obliged to give up all his establishments; his 
gay villa was offered to Queen Caroline, who would, perhaps, 
have bought it, but that her final troubles in this world were 
also betsetting her about that very time. For the present, 
therefore, the villa was shut up, and " left alone with its glory." 
The reverend and aged proprietor, now ten times more bilious 
and more querulous than ever, shipped himself off for France; 
and there, in one of the southern provinces — so far, therefore, 
as climate was concerned, realizing his vision of gayety, but 
for all else the most melancholy of exiles — sick of the world 
and of himself, hating to live, yet more intensely hating to die, 
in a short time the unhappy old man breathed his last, in a 
common lodging house, gloomy and vulgar, and in all things 
the very antithesis to that splendid abode which he had planned 
for the consolation of his melancholy, and for the gay beguile- 
ment of old age. 

At this gentleman's villa, Mrs. Siddons had been paying a 
visit; for the doctor was a worshipper, in a servile degree, of all 
things which flourished in the sunshine of the world's applause. 
To have been the idolized favourite of nations, to have been an 
honoured and even a privileged^ guest at Windsor, that was 
enough for him ; and he did his utmost to do the honours of his 
neighbourhood, not less to glorify himself in the eye of the 
country, who was fortunate enough to have such a guest, than 
to show his respect for the distinguished visitor. Mrs. Siddons 
felt herself flattered by the worthy doctor's splendid hospitali- 
ties; for that they were really splendid, may be judged by this 
fact, communicated to me by Hannah More, viz. that the 
Bishop of London, (Porteus,) when on a visit to Barley Wood, 
being much pressed by the doctor to visit him, had at length 
accepted a dinner invitation. Mrs. Hannah More was, of 
course, included in the invitation, but had found it impossible 
to attend, from ill health ; and the next morning, at breakfast, 
the bishop had assured her, that, in all his London experience, 
in that city of magnificent dinners beyond all other cities of 
the earth, and amongst the princes of the land, he had never 
witnessed an entertainment so perfect in its appointments. 
Gratified as she was, however, by her host's homage, as 
expressed in his splendid style of entertaining, Mrs. Siddons 
was evidently more happy in her residence at Barley Wood. 
The style of conversation pleased her. It was religious: but 
Mrs. Siddons was herself religious ; and at that moment, when 
waiting with anxiety upon a daughter whose languor seemed 



504 DE QUINCEY 

but too ominous in her maternal eyes, she was more than 
usually open to religious impressions, and predisposed to 
religious topics. 

Certain I am, however, from what I then observed, that Mrs. 
Siddons, in common with many women of rank who were on 
the list of the Barley Wood visitors, did not apprehend, in their 
full sense and severity, the peculiar principles of Hannah More. 
This lady, excellent as she was, and incapable of practising any 
studied deceit, had, however, an instinct of worldly wisdom, 
which taught her to refrain from shocking ears polite with 
too harsh or too broad an exposure of all which she believed. 
This, at least, if it were any duty of hers, she considered, per- 
haps, as already fulfilled by her writings; and, moreover, the 
very tone of good breeding, which she had derived from the 
good company she had kept, made her feel the impropriety of 
lecturing her visitors even when she must have thought them 
in error. Mrs. Siddons obviously thought Hannah More a 
person who differed from the world chiefly by applying a 
greater energy, and sincerity, and zeal, to a system of religious 
truth equally known to all. Repentance, for instance — all 
people hold that to be a duty; and Mrs. Hannah More differed 
from them only by holding it to be a duty of all hours, a duty 
for youth not less than for age. But how much would she have 
been shocked to hear that Mrs. Hannah More held all repent- 
ance, however indispensable, yet in itself, and though followed 
by the sincerest efforts at reformation of life, to be utterly 
unavailing as any operative part of the means by which man 
gains acceptance with God. To rely upon repentance, or upon 
anything that man can do for himself, that Mrs. Hannah More 
considered as the mortal taint, as the Ttpwrov ipeudoq in the 
worldly theories of the Christian scheme ; and I have heard the 
two ladies — Mrs. More and Mrs. Siddons, I mean — talking 
by the hour together, as completely at cross purposes as it is 
possible to imagine. Everything in fact of what was special 
in the creed adopted by Mrs. Hannah More, by Wilberforce, 
and many others known as evangelical Christians, is always 
capable, in lax conversation, of being translated into a vague 
general sense, which completely obscures the true limitations 
of the meaning. 

Mrs. Hannah More, however, was too polished a woman 
to allow of any sectarian movement being impressed upon the 
conversation; consequently, she soon directed it to literature, 
upon which Mrs. Siddons was very amusing, from her recol- 
lections of Dr. Johnson, whose fine-turned compliment to her- 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 505 

self, (so much in the spirit of those unique compliments 
addressed to eminent people by Louis XIV) had forever 
planted the, Doctor's memory in her heart. She spoke also of 
Garrick and of Mrs. Garrick; but not, I think, with so much 
respect and affection as Mrs. Hannah More, who had, in her 
youthful days, received the most friendly attentions from both, 
though coming forward at that time in no higher character than 
as the author of " Percy," the most insipid of tragedies. Mrs. 
Siddons was prevailed on to read passages from both Shakes- 
peare and Milton. The dramatic readings were delightful; in 
fact, they were almost stage rehearsals, accompanied with 
appropriate gesticulation. One was the great somnambulist 
scene in " Macbeth," which was the ne plus ultra in the whole 
range of Mrs. Siddons's scenical exhibitions, and can never be 
forgotten by any man who once had the happiness to witness 
that immortal performance of the divine artist. Another, given 
at the request of a Dutch lady, residing in the neighbourhood 
of Barley Wood, was the scene from " King John," of the Lady 
Constance, beginning — " Gone to be married ! gone to swear 
a peace! " etc. The last, and truly superb for the musical into- 
nation of the cadences, was that inimitable apology or pleading 
of Christian charity for Cardinal Wolsey, addressed to his 
bitterest enemy, Queen CatherinCo All these, in different 
degrees and different ways, were exquisite. But the readings 
from Milton were not to my taste. And, some weeks after, 
when, at Mrs. Hannah More's request, I had read to her some 
of Lord Byron's most popular works, I got her to acknowledge, 
in then speaking upon the subject of reading, that perhaps the 
style of Mrs. Siddons's reading had been too much determined 
to the dramatic cast of emphasis, and the pointed expression of 
character and situation which must always belong to a speaker 
bearing a part in a dialogue, to admit of her assuming the 
tone of a rapt poetic inspiration. 

Meantime, whatever she did — whether it were in display of 
her own matchless talents, but always at the earnest request of 
the company or of her hostess — or whether it were in gentle 
acquiescent attention to the display made by others — or 
whether it were as one member of a general party, taking her 
part occasionally, for the amusement of the rest, and contrib- 
uting to the general fund of social pleasure — nothing could 
exceed the amiable, kind, and unassuming deportment of Mrs. 
Siddons. She had retired from the stage,* and no longer 
regarded herself as a public character., But so much the 



506 DE QUINCEY 

Stronger did she seem to think the claims of her friends upon 
anything she could do for their amusement. 

Meantime, amongst the many pleasurable impressions which 
Mrs. Siddons's presence never failed to make, there was one 
which was positively painful and humiliating: it was the degra- 
dation which it inflicted upon other women. One day there 
was a large dinner party at Barley Wood — Mrs. Siddons was 
present; and I remarked to a gentleman who sat next to me — 
a remark which he heartily confirmed — that upon rising to 
let the ladies leave us, Mrs. Siddons, by the mere necessity of 
her regal deportment dwarfed the whole party, and made them 
look ridiculous; though Mrs. H. More, and others of the 
ladies present, were otherwise really women of very pleasing 
appearance. 

One final remark is forced upon me by my recollections of 
Mrs. Jordan, and of her most unhappy end; it is this; and 
strange enough it seems : — That the child of laughter and 
comic mirth, whose laugh itself thrilled the heart with pleasure, 
and who created gayety of the noblest order for one entire 
generation of her countrymen, died prematurely, and in exile, 
and in affliction, which really killed her by its own stings. If 
ever woman died of a broken heart, of tenderness bereaved, and 
of hope deferred, that woman was Mrs. Jordan. On the other 
hand, this sad votary of Melpomene, the queen of the tragic 
stage, died, full of years and honours, in the bosom of her admir- 
ing country, in the centre of idolizing friends, and happy in all 
things except this, that some of those whom she most loved on 
earth had gone before her. Strange contrariety of lots for the 
two transcendent daughters of the comic and tragic muse. For 
my own part, I shall always regard my recollections of Mrs. 
Siddons as those in which chiefly I have an advantage over 
the coming generation; nay, perhaps over all generations; for 
many centuries may revolve without producing such another 
transcendent creature. 

Notes 

^ " Potter " is the local term in northern England for a hawker of 
earthen-ware, many of which class lead a vagrant life, and encamp 
during the summer months like gipsies. 

^This brutal boast might, after all, be a falsehood; and, with respect 
to mere numbers, probably was so. 

' Mrs. Siddons used to mention, that when she was invited to 
Windsor Castle, for the purpose of reading before the Queen and her 
royal daughters, on her first visit, she was ready to sink from weari- 
ness under the effort of standing for so long a time; but on some 
subsequent visit, I have understood that she was allowed to sit, prob- 
ably on the suggestion of one of the younger ladies. 



SOCIETY OF THE LAKES 507 

* I saw her myself upon the stage twice after this meeting at Barley 
Wood; it was at Edinburgh; and the parts were those of Lady Macbeth 
and Lady Randolph. But she then performed only as an expression 
of kindness to her grandchildren. Professor Wilson and myself saw 
her on the occasion from the stage-box, with a delight embittered by 
the certainty that we saw her for the last time. 



THE END 



-■d 



■A-3 



K'^ 



I 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




014 456 259 8 f 



'^^.m 



'.'«'•■' 




, ' .i^.^^.v'^•■ i■';v''^R^^fc:i'l^'■ 






